


The Killing Jar

by 14CombatGeishas



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Animal Death, Child Abuse, F/M, Frostbite, Gen, Murder, Pre-Movie, Thomas/Lucille only becomes romantic in the epilogue, Victorian Medicine, Victorian attitudes about...well...everything, all the terrible things you would expect from a Crimson Peak fic, discussion of burgeoning sexuality, rape mention, the non-con does not involve Thomas or Lucille, young Sharpes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-04 22:20:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5350520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/14CombatGeishas/pseuds/14CombatGeishas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucille Sharpe murdered her mother when she was 14 years old, but her first victim was four years before that.  After their father leaves Thomas in the forest to die Lucille saves her brother’s life and ensures that James Sharpe never is never able to endanger his son’s again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“And it doesn’t hurt?” asked Thomas nervously.  He leaned in over Lucille’s desk where the jarred butterfly was in its last death throes.  

 

She caught the Holly Blue earlier that day when leaving the slaughterhouse with a bucket of offal.  She abandoned her chore to catch the thing in her cupped hands.  She had felt it fluttering helplessly against her hands as she ran upstairs to her room.  She protected it from the moths –  _her_  moths since she started caring for them.  They seemed to sense the presence of a living butterfly.  She saved it from the cold.  Now it was in the killing jar she prepared earlier for a particularly black moth that had already bred and become sluggish.  It was too beautiful to allow to die on its own.  But this butterfly was a far better find.  

 

“No,” Lucille said, looking up from her notes.  “It probably doesn’t feel a thing.”

 

“Probably?”

 

“The ether calms it.  Dulls the pain.  It gets sleepy, flaps its wings a few more times, and before it knows it, it’s dead.”  

 

Thomas cast his eyes around the room at the insects Lucille collected and pinned over the years.  They were on every wall of the room.  Most were the strange dark moths endemic to Allerdale Hall but others were pale butterflies, spiders, stick bugs; she even had a dried frog’s skin.  There were living bugs, too.  A huge mesh cage contained some of the largest and darkest moths Lucille could find.  On her dresser beside their preserved predecessors was a tank she rigged to hold her cocoons and caterpillars.  Thomas once asked if they could see the dead moths on her walls. Lucille had replied that if they did, they would only see they would be beautiful forever, something otherwise impossible. 

 

“Before it knows it…” Thomas repeated, “it sounds so easy.”

 

“Doesn’t it?” Lucille answered.  She closed her notebook, marking her page with her pencil.  She kissed him on the forehead.

 

“Sometimes I think it might be better that way,” Thomas added in an undertone.  “Being dead.”

 

Lucille gently ran a hand through his hair, “I think so too.  Sometimes…” but she didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence.  

 

“BOY!” the voice of James Sharpe echoed through the massive complex of Allerdale Hall.  “GET YOUR SORRY ARSE DOWN HERE, NOW!”  

 

Thomas and Lucille’s eyes met.  There were times when Lucille, too, thought it would be better if they were dead.  They couldn’t be hurt, then.  Time would stop. It would leave them behind, and Thomas and Lucille would be free.  

 

“Lucille, I’m afraid,” he whispered.  

 

“I know,” Lucille said, hugging him.  

 

Their father, James Sharpe, loathed his children, yet he was taking Thomas on a hunt with him.  It made Lucille more uneasy about this summoning than usual.  Their father said he was making one last gambit, one final attempt to make Thomas a man, by taking him grouse hunting.  Thomas would do it.  He would go and try to prove himself, if only for the sake of his health.

 

Their father called Thomas a “poofter.”  He thought his son was too effeminate to carry on the family name.  He strangled Thomas almost to death whenever he got the chance, declaring his long embarrassment over whenever the boy lapsed into unconsciousness.  He hated Thomas more than anything, so Lucille thought he must have had an ulterior motive for the hunting invitation.  Why would he take Thomas hunting if not solely to rid himself of a failed heir?  Lucille hadn’t voiced her fears aloud, but looking into Thomas’s face she knew he had come to the same conclusion.  

 

She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly to her chest.  “It will be alright.  You will be home before you know it.  If you kill something, he may even let you alone for a few days.”  She could feel his heartbeat pounding against her.  She kissed him then pulled back, her hands on his shoulders.  There were tears in his eyes.  He was breathing hard, struggling to swallow the sobs Lucille knew wanted to escape him.  They both knew that it would be worse if he was caught crying.  “Do you believe me?”

 

He nodded weakly.  “Yes.  I always trust you.”

 

Lucille smiled sadly and tucked him under the chin.  “I know.”  Behind her the butterfly stopped moving in the jar.  “I love you, Thomas.”

 

“I love you, Lucille.” 

  
  
“Always?” 

  
  
“Always,” Thomas promised her.  She kissed him again.  She didn’t want to let him go.  

 

Lucille followed Thomas from the room.  She wouldn’t let him leave without seeing him off.  She had to stay brave for him.  She had to protect him.  Thomas should never be hurt.  He was too precious, too perfect; he should be kept safe from all the horrors in the world.  She was terrified, but Thomas was shaking with fear.  He walked now like a condemned man, looking far older than his eight years.  

 

James Sharpe watched as Thomas made his way slowly down the stairs, step by step.  Their father stood at the doorway, pulling on his riding gloves.  He had a rifle strapped over his shoulder and was wearing brown leather boots caked with red clay.  

 

Everything got covered in red in the end; the clay stained all.  It leached up through the ground, it was in the pipes, it got under one’s nails, and in the Sharpe’s blood.  When Lucille was younger she thought that their blood was literally tainted with red clay, why wouldn’t it be when everything else was?  

 

“Faster, poofter!” snapped James, brandishing his crop.  Thomas froze up for a moment, his body going stiff with fear.  Lucille bit her lip and resisted the impulse to urge him on.  “FASTER!” their father roared.  Thomas bolted the rest of the stairs.  James pushed his son out the door with his riding crop as if he was too disgusted with Thomas to touch him his hand.  

 

For a moment Thomas was illuminated by the sunlight, so rare in Allerdale Hall.  He looked back at Lucille with a sorrowful look on his face for support, he looked like an angel in the sun’s glow, more beautiful and sublime than any human could be.  She gave him what she hoped would be a reassuring smile.  She wasn’t sure if it could be.

 

The door closed behind them and Lucille let out a sob.  She sank down onto the floor, clinging to the railing, tears sliding down her face. He would kill Thomas. He would.  No one could stop him, they were alone out there.  No one could stop him and no one but Lucille would care.  

 

Her father’s favorite maid, Mary, found Lucille there and chased her away, taking a swat at her, and reminding her she had chores to do.  Lucille may have been the master’s daughter, but she was fair game.  Her parents loathed her and the servants used her as a scapegoat, their way of taking out their hatred for their employers. Lucille ran off, furiously wiping the tears from her eyes.  

 

James came back after dark, carrying a bag full of grouses. Lucille ran down with the desperate hope that Thomas would be there. He wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t.

 

“Father?” Lucille would never dare talk to this man under normal circumstances. She would avoid him at all costs, crossing paths with him would mean a beating.  But she needed to know. She needed to know where Thomas was. Her heart was high and tight in her throat, choking her voice. “Where…where is Thomas?”

 

He dropped the birds into Cook’s arms. He smirked at his daughter in way of reply.

 

“Father, please!” Lucille shrieked, her voice cracking, “Where is my brother?!”

 

He responded with a backhanded slap so strong it threw Lucille back. She stumbled and fell.  She could taste blood and she put her sleeve to her mouth. The blue of her sleeve darkened; as did the glare she shot her father.

 

“If you’ve killed him, I’ll–” Lucille began and James hit her again.

 

“Hold your tongue, you little bitch!  You won’t do a damn thing.” His voice went from a yell to a deadly whisper.  He grabbed her by the hair, pulling and twisting until she was forced to her feet to avoid being scalped. “If the boy is dead, it’s his own fault. I left him out there. If he’s not a poof he’ll make his way home.” James smirked. “But knowing my ‘son,’” and he said the word with such disdain it made Lucille growl, “he shan’t be wasting my food any longer.” 

 

She screamed like an animal and took a mad swipe at her father’s face.  James threw her to the cold, hard ground again.

 

“I’ll find him!” she snapped at her father.  “I will bring Thomas home!”

 

“If you want to live any longer than he does you will do no such thing,” rumbled James Sharpe.   “Go, pluck the grouses and get out of my sight!”

 

 

***

 

 

Over the next two days Lucille went into the forest to search for Thomas until she lost light or was otherwise forced to return to Allerdale Hall. She started earlier on the third day, seizing her opportunity to escape after she finished with the animals.

 

Care for the family’s animals, particularly their slaughter, fell on her shoulders for years now.  There was a time when it scared her, made her feel vicious and cruel, but that had long since passed.  The only thing that remained from her initial reactions was the terrible curiosity that gripped her.  She didn’t mind the blood and gore anymore.  She no longer gagged at the smell. She was deaf to the too-human shrieks and squeals from the hogs. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t feel. She didn’t even need to sneak up on them anymore. She could kill a pig looking it in the eye. She gutted them feeling nothing but a cold scientific pride at her own precision and fascination with her findings.  Rabbits, pigs, chickens, they were very different from the insects she had collected and dissected before, but not so different from one another.  

 

She knew she would never be allowed into the medical lectures at the Sharpe Alma Mater of Oxford, but she made her own surgical theater here, experimenting, cataloging, comparing her findings to the scientific texts buried in the stacks of Allerdale Hall’s vast library. She even dabbled in vivisection, watching the still-beating hearts throb hopelessly, muscles convulse, and lungs swell and shrink in terrified rhythm.  It was her own private lab in her own private world, a world which no one else but the moths ever dared to enter.  She had very little, but she had this.  It had also made her very handy with a blade and unusually strong.  

 

Today she killed a rabbit and a chicken.  She butchered them, skinned them, beheaded them, gutted them, did everything but cook them for the lazy staff.  Lucille had the feeling that when father had to do the next round of staff reduction (he would almost certainly lose money on his upcoming journey to India, and could probably lose a thousand pounds before the boat even reached the shore) Cook would be the first to go.  After all, Lucille practically did his job anyway, and they didn’t have to pay Lucille.  She passed the animals off to him, one then the other, not saying a word.  

 

“Your mother says you’re to go to the nursery and wait for your tutors,” Cook said, examining the rabbit.  It had been gray and soft and trusting.  It hadn’t even tried to run like the skittish ones did, either too dim or too compliant in the end.  Or perhaps it simply accepted its horrible fate.

 

“They won’t come until afternoon,” Lucille replied.  

 

“I’m not the one to complain to,” Cook pointed out, dropping the bloodied carcass onto the counter.  

 

There was no one to complain to.  If Lucille said even a word to her parents it was likely to result in an assault, regardless of the word it might be.  Odds were that Beatrice Sharpe wanted her daughter to sit silently in the attic until the tutors arrived so that she – Beatrice – could pretend Lucille didn’t exist.  Or else she was trying to ensure Lucille wouldn’t go looking for Thomas.  After all she had no more love for her son than their father did.

 

Lucille said nothing else.  She pulled off her bloody apron and left it by the door.  Cook wouldn’t watch where she was going.  He wouldn’t see her go outside or run towards the forest that hemmed the grounds (it had been so much larger once, she saw it in paintings and in her own early memory, but James had been selling off the Sharpe’s ancestral land to feed his habits for years and the forest was being quickly chopped away).   Even if the cook did see her, he wouldn’t care.

 

Lucille knew she looked a mess, but didn’t mind.  She rinsed her hands but her wrists were still bloody.  She felt her hair sticking to her face with her own sweat and the animals’ blood.  Her dress was clean by virtue of the apron, but it would soon grow dirty from the thick undergrowth.  Let her look savage.

 

She was not going to stick to a trail.  She’d followed those the first day and found nothing.  The second she’d gone to the east.  Today she would go west towards the kilns.  

 

The kilns were like cysts swelling from the ground, made of the clay bricks they fired within. As well as bricks, those kilns they made pots, jars, bowls, anything and everything that could be made of clay.  Their father loathed steel as it rapidly replaced even their strongest clay.  It was robbing them, he said.  It was why he switched to a cheaper glaze.  

 

It was that glaze that killed at least half dozen of the kiln workers last spring.  They used to lick their brushes and some played silly pranks like painting their lips and teeth to make them shine.  The old glaze hadn’t made them ill.  The new glaze contained more arsenic.  Her father said he didn’t know the glaze was poisonous but Lucille thought the truth was closer to his not caring.  Just like he hadn’t cared when a flood in one of the mines killed off all the unfortunates unlucky enough to be down there one particularly rainy summer, when there was a cave-in, or when any other others in his employ met an untimely end.  James Sharpe did not care about anyone but himself.  Besides, Lucille knew he delighted in causing pain.  

 

It took time to get to the forest, but Lucille did not pause.  She didn’t feel the cold or the wind or her aching muscles.  All she thought of was Thomas, cold and abandoned, somewhere in those trees.  It was mid-November, cold, getting colder. The first snow of the year started to fall. The farther she went, the more the storm picked up.  

 

Lucille’s heart was pounding in her chest.  She had to find Thomas today. If she didn’t, he would die in the snow…if he wasn’t dead already.  No!  No, she wouldn’t think like that!  

 

“Thomas is alive,” she told herself. 

 

He couldn’t be dead. If he was dead she would be, too.  They were bonded.  They couldn’t be separated by distance, let alone death. He had to be alive, because if he was dead, she would somehow know. She wouldn’t be alive and whole if Thomas was dead.   She would find him!  

 

“Thomas!” She called out to him as soon as she reached the trees, just as she had before.  And just as before, there came no response.  She would do this systematically; she walked west just out of sight of the vast plane around Allerdale Hall.  Every two minutes she called out his name as loudly as she could.  She called his name until her throat was sore.  The forest was silent in the snow but for her own feet cracking and crunching across the frosted twigs and leaves.  Nothing stirred.

 

Hours passed.  Morning became afternoon.  The snowstorm raged on above her.  Her hands became numb with cold.  She moved a little deeper into the forest.

 

“Thomas!” Lucille called for what felt like the thousandth time.  She stumbled into a grove of holly.  “Thom–”

 

She stopped.  There he was. He lay beneath the green branches of an English holly, only partially shielded from the storm.  The snow was falling onto his legs and feet, but he hadn’t moved.  His dark curly hair was white with frost.  His face was bloodlessly pale.  He was still, his lips were white, his eyes were closed and his hands were clasped over his chest.  His tiny body was bruised, eyes sunken, fingers swollen.  He clothing was bloodied and torn in some places.  He looked…

 

“No, no, no please!” Lucille sobbed running to his side, the forest echoed with her footsteps and her tears. “Please don’t be dead!”

 

She dropped down to her knees besides him, pulling him up to her chest, cradling him in her arms.  She rocked him.  One hand supported him while the other touched his cold cheek. There were tears frozen on his face. His arms fell limply to his sides.  But while he was cold, he wasn’t as cold as the air around them. There was a slight blush to his cheeks.  Shaking, Lucille brought her hand from his cheek to his neck. She held her breath.

 

_Yes!_

 

It was faint, slow, but it was there: a pulse.

 

“Oh thank God!  Thank God!” She sobbed, burying her head in his chest.

 

He was alive!  

 

But for how much longer? She sat up again, new resolve rushing through her.  Any fatigue or cold she felt from her long day of searching had gone out of her. “I’m here, Thomas,” she told him, “I’m here to take you home!”

 

She kissed his cold cheek and draped him across her back. She looped his arms around her neck and held his legs, leaning his thin body over her so his head lay on her shoulder. Like this she ran, ran with all her might back to the house, ran through the forest and fields and did not stop until she knew they were safe from the cold.

 

Their mother was still in bed with her narcotics and their father was away on business until tomorrow. She had time. She had time to save Thomas from the brink. Nothing could stop her.

 

She kicked open the front doors, holding Thomas in place on her back.

 

“Get me some hot tea!” Lucille screamed to one of the maids, as she ran up to her bedroom with Thomas still on her back. She knew the help hated her, but how could anyone besides someone truly evil hold Thomas responsible for his family?  If they had any goodness at all in their hearts, they would not let Thomas die.  Thomas was good, innocent, and pure.  There was no creature on Earth so deserving of love and protection.  Anyone could see that.  How could they not?  Thomas was perfect.  

 

Once in her room Lucille deposited Thomas on the bed.  She knew what to do.  The Sharpe children were both experts at healing wounds and Lucille took a particular interest in it and in bodies in general.  They already had years of practice, treating and healing one another.  And what they hadn’t done for each other, Lucille had most likely read about.  In its library, Allerdale Hall contained books on every subject imaginable, including many heavy medical tomes. Lucille read them with the greatest fascination, she eagerly consumed anything on the subject of biology.  From those books she knew what to do to keep Thomas from freezing to death. She tore off his wet clothes. Shoes were thrown, – one then two – over her shoulder, stockings, trousers, undergarments, shirt, suspenders – all of it tossed away.

 

She paused for a moment, her hand hovering over him.  She had seen Thomas undressed before, particularly when they were younger children and were allowed to bathe together (their mother forbade that years ago, however, denying them even that comfort).  She had seen his naked body in the years since then, glances through doors not closed entirely (Lucille’s curiosity often led her to spy on the other residents of the house), after one of their parents dealt Thomas a harsh punishment that Lucille had been unable to deflect onto herself, or when they slept in one bed for warmth or comfort and he changed into his nightclothes in front of her, unashamed as only the sinless could be.  But this was the first time in years she got a good look at his bare body.  She found herself fascinated by it.  

 

Thomas’s body was so different from hers, especially now that Lucille was ten, nearly eleven, and she noticed that her body was changing, her chest starting to swell.  Lucille knew, of course, men were different from women.  She knew she was becoming a woman.  She was even learning what those differences were for.  She knew what sex was, and even if she didn’t quite understand it, it fascinated her. Their father made no secret of his exploits and the library had many of his own private books filled with strange – but intriguing – pictures, including one all in an odd top-heavy script with vivid images of men and women intimately linked like wasps or moths sometimes were.  Other images were hidden and Lucille spent hours going through all the books their father brought back from the Orient finding the interesting pictures hidden in – and sometimes on – their pages.  

 

She’d seen it happen with her own eyes.  The first time it was by accident.  She had been hiding from her father, not knowing it wasn’t her he was after.  She ended up watching him and Mary.  She knew now what it was, but at the time she hadn’t.  It was confusing, terrifying, and strangely exciting.  She saw him undress her, push her down against the drawing room sofa, and do something to her that made Mary shout and squeak.  Mary hadn’t wanted him to do it at first, but she’d given in before he lowered his trousers.  It was violent, vicious, but made Lucille feel…she still wasn’t sure.  She felt something deep inside of her, fear but also a fuzzy feeling spreading from her very core.

 

Looking at Thomas’s bare form she felt that hot, fuzzy feeling well back into her.  She resisted the sudden urge to touch him.  He couldn’t be left in the open long enough to see if his would react like their father’s did when one of the maids touched him.

 

Removing his clothes, she found Thomas was more badly hurt than she had thought.  The bloodstained sleeve was stripped away to reveal a scabbed, almost bone-deep gash across his left arm.  When the trousers were removed, the scrapes on his legs and ankles stood out clay red on his marble white skin.  The insides of his hands and arms were skinned and raw, probably from pushing through the underbrush. Something had stuck him in the side, probably after falling onto it. He must have removed whatever it had been, but the puncture was still there, deep and wide open.  His chest and abdomen were badly bruised, and Lucille thought his ribs must have been broken.  But getting him warm was more important than the already closing wounds. Lucille and Thomas had both gotten far worse treatment from their parents.  These wounds wouldn’t kill him yet, the cold very quickly was.  

 

The wounds that concerned her most were what she knew to be frostbite.  His fingers were swollen and blistered from cold, his toes and feet were darkened with it.  According to all the books she read, she had to massage them, to gradually rewarm them, and wrap them up.  She knew that if it didn’t get better she would need to cut them all off.  That was not something she was prepared to do to her poor, dear Thomas, but if she had to, she knew she could.  

 

She wrapped Thomas up in every blanket she had. “Stay here,” she said, needlessly, before running to the next room to get Thomas’s blankets, too.   He looked paler inside against warmer surroundings, but his breathing was steadier and he shivered violently rather than remaining deathly still. She wiped the tears from his eyes as they became liquid again.  She dried his hair.  She began to sing his lullaby to him, the song she always used to calm him, to soothe him.

 

“ _Let the wind blow kindly_

_in the sails of your dreams_

_and the moon light your journey_

_and bring you to me…_ ”

 

He groaned quietly.

 

“Thomas?” she gasped, her heart skipping a beat.  It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard in her life.  It meant hope was not lost.  Thomas would come back to her.

 

“Lu-Luc–” he began, but Lucille quietly shushed him.

 

“Don’t try to talk, my dear, dear Thomas,” she said, kissing his clammy forehead. “You are safe now.”

 

She sat with him until it became evident no one was bringing her the tea he needed. He needed something hot in his system, she knew that much. “Stay here, Thomas,” she said. “Do not try to move or speak. I’ll be right back.”

 

She moved as quickly as possible, running down to the kitchen. She passed one of the other maids, Elizabeth, whom she ignored despite her asking, “Lucille?  Where on Earth are you going?”  They never called her “Mistress” anymore, not since her parents began firing servants and reduced Lucille to their status.  Elizabeth was small, young, and beautiful and she didn’t even try to resist their father’s advances like Mary did. Lucille had seen him touch her as well, grabbing and kneading her breasts, kissing her neck, sliding his hands up her dress to a place that made her gasp and arch. She’d seen Elizabeth touch him back, put her mouth around him even when he made her choke.  

 

As a child Lucille was banished from the servants’ quarters.  Since then she saw their father often make his way down there to do whatever he did to the remaining female servants. But then, hypocrisy was the least of their parents’ crimes.

 

The kitchen was unsurprisingly devoid of human life. The only thing that moved was a dark moth, which fluttered and landed on the rabbit Lucille killed earlier that morning. It was no more prepared than it had been then; Cook seemed to have abandoned it shortly after Lucille handed it off.  

 

It had been such a delicate and innocent thing, unknowing, helpless, just waiting for the cleaver to swing. Lucille was so surrounded by death, she sometimes didn’t notice it. But she was suddenly moved.  It had been so helpless and adorable, like Thomas.  In the hands of its captors – again, like Thomas’s – death was inevitable. She almost cried for the rabbit as she cried now for her brother.  

 

Their father would kill Thomas before he came of age.  He needed Thomas gone if he wanted a different heir.  Their mother was not a young woman he would have to act soon if he wanted another son.  He may have already killed Thomas. 

 

_No_. 

 

No, Lucille would not let Thomas die. She would do something, anything, to keep her poor brother alive. Whatever it took, Thomas would not die so long as she was alive herself.

 

She threw the kettle onto the stove, spilling water and tealeaves in her haste. She kept her ear to the door so she could hear any servant coming, any cries from Thomas, any movement from their mother, or, worst of all, her father returning early.  The water took an age to boil and the tea took even longer to steep.  She ran upstairs with the teapot still filled with what was mostly water.  Under normal circumstances she would have waited just the right amount of time with just the right amount of leaves.  She skilled at making tea, and her father would have no other servant do it.  But this was about survival rather than comfort, the warmth was more important than the taste. 

 

Nothing stopped her and Thomas was still alive when Lucille returned to her room. He hadn’t moved in the cocoon of blankets she left him in. His eyes were open now, although she wasn’t sure if he could really see her or not. His pale blue eyes were glazed, but not lifeless. She helped him sit up and held him there.  For a moment he fought, trying to push her away. His swollen fingers wrapped weakly around her wrist and he choked as she tipped the tea down his throat.

 

“Shh, it’s me. It’s Lucille,” she whispered. “You must drink. You  _must_!  It’s the only way you will survive.”

 

He relaxed at the sound of her voice, his fingers going slack.  He leaned heavily against the arm she had wrapped around his back.  After a few sips he gagged and Lucille was only just fast enough to get her waste-bin under his chin before he vomited. His entire body shook and heaved, tears streamed down his ashen face. He brought up thin yellowish bile, his stomach so empty that there was almost nothing left in his tiny body to vomit. She rubbed his back and sang to him, trying to ease him through it. When the wave passed, she put the bin on the floor beside the bed, near enough to grab it up again, and picked the teacup up off the tray again.

 

“No,” Thomas moaned, it was the first word he had spoken since she found him in the woods. It broke Lucille’s heart that it was to protest, that he was so badly hurt that even this kindness, this necessity, hurt him. Any touch was too much for him. But Lucille had to make him better. She knew what was best for him, even if it hurt now he would thank her later. She just had to get him through it.  She knew what was best for him and he did not.  

 

“Hold my hand,” she told him, leaning him against the pillows so she could offer it to him. “Squeeze it as hard as you need to, but you must drink.  It may hurt now but it won’t later.”  He took her hand but his fingers were too numb and blistered for him to cling tightly to her. She kept herself from crying as she forced the liquid down his throat.  She kissed him, hummed, rocked him.  

 

Time passed.  He threw up again.  He shivered.  He drank tea and ate bread Lucille toasted on the kitchen fire.  He groaned, coughed, stuttered out single syllables.  It was about an hour or so before Lucille thought she could risk peeling away the blankets to deal with his wounds.  She began to move him and Thomas struggled, squeezing his eyes more tightly shut.  

 

“Shh, I’m going to clean you up,” Lucille said, brushing a hand down his face. He was gaining color back in his cheeks.

 

He nodded although she hadn’t offered him a choice. Lucille peeled back the blankets revealing Thomas’s body, less pale, pinker, still shivering violently but looking much more alive.  His heartbeat was faster, more normal, beneath her hand when she pressed it to his chest.  The wound on his arm was sticky with the blood and pus that had started to ooze onto the innermost blankets.  The same was true of the puncture on his side.  Luckily she could tell from his breathing that his lungs were not punctured by his broken ribs. One of these same ribs had been broken three years earlier when their newly crippled mother struck him with her cane repeatedly after finding out Lucille was doing his chores for him.  

 

Lucille’s fingers ghosted gently over the torn skin on his side, Thomas hissed through his teeth but did not flinch.  She tisked and gave Thomas a sad smile as he looked up at her through his half-opened eyes, clearer than they had been before.  

 

They had done this for each other for years, cleaning up one another, healing, patching their wounds.  One of them – usually Lucille – would endure their parents’ abuse, then the other would clean and dress the wounds. The worst required stitches, which Thomas was too squeamish to do. Lucille always sewed them both up.  She had gotten very good at it.  Really she found no difference between stitching two swatches of cloth or two swatches of skin together.  

 

Earlier that year Lucille found their father beating a nearly unconscious Thomas, hunched in on himself on the ground.  James Sharpe was using his riding whip with strikes hard enough to cut cloth and the skin below it.  Lucille ran in front of her brother, cursing their father.  She refused to move when ordered and so James Sharpe turned his attention to her with redoubled efforts.  The beating had been one of the worse she ever had. James Sharpe hit his daughter hard enough that the thin wood-and-cord tip of his riding crop sliced open the corner of her mouth.  

 

He left both children lying in their mingled blood.  They remained there on the floor for some time before Thomas was able to stumble upright and haul his sister to the doorway. Thomas was so much smaller than she that it was impossible for him to get her all the way to her room.  He nearly dropped her in the hallway.  He clung to her arm, his hands slick with his own blood.  Lucille woke from her faint there.  

 

Lucille tried to promise Thomas she was well enough to walk (despite not being sure of it herself, her father whipped her back so hard that in her agony she thought he may have managed to sever her spine) but found the pain from her mouth so intense she let out a shriek before she could get out more than a word.  She collapsed sobbing.  Thomas comforted her as she sat hunched over, sweat and blood cooling on her face.  Her finger traced the gash on her lip, able to touch the teeth and gums through it. The pain it sent through her was so intense, a white hot jolt of lightening, that she gagged and nearly vomited.  

 

She cried.  Sobbed.  Thomas gave her a handkerchief, he helped her to her room, got her into bed (on her front, which, with the exception of her face, was less badly hurt), and fetched a basin of water to clean her wounds.   He did so, amiably, kissing each bloody wound with the reverence of an apostle.  They were both so covered in each other’s blood it was impossible to tell from whom it came.  

 

When Thomas kissed her lip, Lucille’s tears spiked into mad laughter.  Thomas looked at her in confusion.  Lucille told him she was laughing because regardless of what their father did they had each other.  They loved each other.  They would never be apart.  She wiped his tear- and blood-stained face with her thumbs, palms cupping his soft cheeks, smearing the two together: his blood and hers; his tears and hers.  They were impossible to tell apart, they could have been the blood and tears of one creature, as if they were one entity somehow severed into two halves.  

 

She sewed her lip closed with the same thread she used to mend Thomas’s trousers when he tore them the week before while collecting scraps for his latest project. Thomas couldn’t look as she neatly worked the needle and thread through her skin but he did her the favor of holding her hair back and away from the wound.  She sat on a stool in front of a mirror with Thomas behind her, his head turned as far from the grizzly operation as it could turn. He apologized continually for crying, but Lucille didn’t mind.  Thomas deserved to be a child, to have fear and joy, tears and laughter.  One of them should be a child at least.

 

Now the wound on her lip was an ugly scar, purplish, long, and upraised against her pale skin.  Thomas was well past crying this time. She took the bandages from their hiding spot in her almost empty toy chest. She fetched water and a cloth for his wounds from the WC.  

 

She returned to find him looking at his blistered fingers.  She took one hand and kissed the palm.  She wrapped his fingers, one by one.  First one hand, then the other.  

 

“What will happen to them?” he asked.

 

“I will make them better,” Lucille told him softly.  

 

“I can’t feel them,” he whispered, looking up at Lucille with horror in his eyes.  “Lucille, why can’t I feel them?”

 

“The cold took the feeling out of them.  It will come back when the blood starts flowing again.” She massaged his swollen digits, one by one, applying pressure, again one hand then the other, going back and forth between them.  At first he watched in silence but after she had been massaging them for a quarter of an hour or so he winced in pain.  Lucille smiled mirthlessly at him. “I told you feeling would come back.”

 

“I didn’t want it to hurt,” Thomas said through gritted teeth.

 

“Pain is important, Thomas.  Sometimes things have to hurt, then they get better,” she told him gently.  

 

“I don’t like it,” Thomas said tearily.

 

“That doesn’t matter.  Some things have to happen even if you don’t want them to.”  She did not stop even as he winced, continuing her progress from his right hand to his left.  He sniffled and held his breath.  Lucille leaned forward and kissed his cheek, tasting the salt of his tears. She didn’t want to hurt him, but she truly believed what she said.  Nearly everything in life caused pain, but sometimes good came of it. “Does it hurt much?”

 

“It feels like fire,” he said through his teeth.

 

“That’s good,” Lucille said carefully. She wasn’t sure. Maybe it was a fever. Maybe it was something worse. But she wouldn’t make him more afraid than he already was. She finished with his fingers when he could move them again and went on to his toes. They looked almost bruised from cold or like black marble.  She felt a rush go through her and she was afraid to touch them.  But she had to fix him.

 

“Will I lose my feet?” he asked in a voice strangely free of emotion.  

 

“Why would you say that?” Lucille asked fearfully, glancing up at him.  

 

“I still can’t feel them,” he said.

 

“Like your hands?” Lucille asked.

 

“But my hands weren’t black,” he said.  “And I could move them now.”  

 

“You won’t lose your feet,” Lucille said convincingly.  

 

“Will I walk like mother?” Thomas asked in that same flat tone.  “Will I need a cane?  Father will kill me if I need a cane.”

 

“You will not walk like mother, either,” Lucille promised, bandaging his feet toe by toe.

 

“And no cane?”

 

“No cane,” Lucille nodded as she began to massage his feet.

 

Thomas was peering down his body at her.  As time passed she knew she was making progress by how he winced.  When he hissed through his teeth Lucille kissed his ankle without stopping her massage.  “See?” she said.  

 

“Yes,” Thomas closed his eyes and spoke in a pained whisper.  

 

Lucille knew she was supposed to do this more slowly.  She was supposed to use snow or cold water on his frostbite, at least according to her books, but she didn’t understand how cold would fix cold.  She wanted to touch him with her own warm fingers instead.  

 

Once she’d tended his frostbite she went to the puncture wound on his side.  “What happened Thomas?” she asked as she brought hot water to it, cleaning away dirt and debris.  She fetched the needle and thread and saw Thomas turn his head away.  He tensed but didn’t cry when the needle went in and Lucille began to pull the wound closed.  His breathing became more ragged but he still answered her question as calmly as he could.

 

“Last night I tried to climb up a tree to find the house,” he said blankly, staring at the wall to his left.  “I fell out of a high branch and a stick…it stabbed me, right into me. I pulled it out…but it hurt…”  She kissed the skin above his newly closed wound before bandaging it to indicate she was done.  She eased him into a sitting position.  

 

“What did father do?”

 

“When?” Thomas asked, brow furrowed.

 

“When he left you,” Lucile clarified.  She supported him with one hand and bandaged his bruised abdomen with the other to ensure his broken ribs would heal correctly.  She placed one of his hands over the end of the bandage so that it would stay in place until she was ready to tie the two ends together.  

 

“He…went after something.  Grouses, I expect,” Thomas recited, still staring off at the wall as if the events were inscribed there.  “I didn’t want to see.  I didn’t want to see him kill it, all that blood, Lucille, and they don’t want to die…it isn’t easy like butterflies…they’re so scared and in pain…” he trailed off shivering and she knew this time it had nothing to do with cold.  “I stayed back and I waited until I heard the shot.  But…I didn’t.  I never heard it.  I don’t know how far father went, but I realized…” he swallowed “…I realized he wasn’t coming back.”

 

Lucille stopped, the bandages half way around his back.  She looked into his thin frightened face, his eyes wide in their shadowy sockets.  She kissed him softly on the cheek.  It still felt cold under her lips.  “You are safe now.”  

 

“But I’m  _not_.  Neither of us is.  Where is father?” he asked this last suddenly, inhaling sharply and coughing as a result.  

 

Lucille rubbed his back through his coughing fit.  “Burgh-by-Sands.  He’s been there since the morning after he left you.  He was due back tomorrow but because of the storm I doubt he’ll be home on time.  He’d use anything as an excuse to stay away.”

 

Thomas relaxed, coughing again but going limp against Lucille.  She finished wrapping the bandages around his midsection and tied them off.  She leaned him back against the pillows.  As Lucille started to clean his arm Thomas let out a sharp breath, coughed, groaned, and closed his eyes tightly.  

 

“Don’t worry about the pain, it will leave soon enough,” Lucille tried to convince him.

 

“It isn’t that,” Thomas said in a choked voice.

 

“Then what ever is the matter?” Lucille asked.

 

“He’ll kill me when he comes back.  He wants me to die, Lucille.  He wants to kill me.  And he’ll kill you, too, for saving me,” his voice cracked.  When he said that their father would kill Lucille, tears escaped his eyes, spilling down his cheeks.  Lucille was touched.  She tied the bandage on his arm and went to work cleaning the smaller ones on his ankles, legs, wrists, and hands.  

 

“He won’t,” Lucille said.  She knew it was true.  She would never let her father harm Thomas and she wouldn’t die while Thomas was alive.  Thomas and she were tied together. 

 

“But…how?” Thomas didn’t distrust Lucille’s answer but he clearly didn’t understand it.  He had faith in Lucille, but the fear he held for their father was perhaps stronger.  “What will stop him?”

 

“I will,” Lucille said.  “He will never touch you again, Thomas.”

 

Thomas stared at her.  He tried to voice a concern but Lucille gently quieted him.  “Trust me,” she told him, “trust me.” She tied off the final bandage, cutting it from the roll.  She climbed into bed next to him and pulled the still-clean blankets around them both, kicking the bloodied blankets away.  She tucked her arm under his head and wrapped the other around him. He wiggled closer to her and she held him tightly. He lay his head on her chest, his bandaged hands holding her dress as best they could. He still shivered and Lucille sang softly to him, easing them both to sleep.

 

“ _We can’t live in the mountains,_

_We can’t live out at sea._

_Where oh, where oh, my lover_

_shall I come to thee?_ ”

 


	2. Chapter 2

The night passed fitfully.  Thomas woke up a few times over the course of the night to vomit or from pain.  But by two in the morning, Lucille’s fears were alleviated.  Thomas slept.  His temperature returned to normal.  He was able to drink the tea and eat the toast Lucille made for him without complaint.  She curled up besides him, cradling him close, tangling them together, and fell asleep again.  

 

The sound of the heavy front doors slamming jogged them both awake. Hours had passed, the sun was rising again, and the sky was pink and dull. It had stopped snowing while they slept.  The world outside was glittering and white. The snow was thick, deep, and perfect as far as the eye could see.  

 

She listened for another sound. She glanced down at Thomas.  He was awake and clung tightly to her, his blue eyes wide.  The color he’d gotten back drained quickly from his face. Before Lucille could say anything or offer him any soothing words, James Sharpe’s voice reached his children in Lucille’s room. He was too distant to be understood, but there was no mistaking that rumble. 

 

He didn’t sound upset yet, or no more so than usual, but it was only a matter of time before someone told him that Lucille did exactly what he told her not to do. She found Thomas. She brought him back to the house. She cleaned his wounds and bandaged him up. Thomas neither found his own way back nor had he died.  

 

Lucille held Thomas more tightly, the fingers of one hand knotted in his hair, the other on his back.  She had thought their father would use the storm as an excuse to stay away from here.  Maybe he’d angered a debt collector or bookie in Burgh, or maybe he wanted to come home to find out if Thomas’s body had been found.  

 

“Where are they?!” roared James Sharpe; it was the first clear thing he said. Anger knotted in Lucille’s stomach.  Clearly he knew now.  Someone had tattled on Lucille, probably Mary, but it may have been anyone. The servants often threw the children to the wolves to save themselves.  Hate rose like bile in her gut, hatred for her father, the maid, her mother, the house, everyone and everything in the world except for her little brother, her perfect brother.  She wouldn’t let anything hurt him.  He would be safe.  

 

Thomas shook in Lucille’s arms, tears flowing down his pale cheeks.  He buried his head in her nightdress.  “He’s coming, he’s going to kill us! He’s coming!” Thomas whispered feverishly into the fabric.  

 

Her sympathy for her brother overwhelmed her hatred for her father and her expression softened.  She softly kissed the top of his head and tipped her face upward towards hers.  “No,” Lucille said calmly, looking into his eyes. “He is not.”  Thomas searched her face with wide teary eyes and Lucille managed to smile even as their father’s footsteps -- running, taking the stairs two at a time -- grew closer. “What did I tell you before?”

 

“That he will not hurt me,” Thomas managed.

 

“Ever again,” Lucille added. She kissed him on the forehead, cherishing the warmth his skin regained.  She tried to get to her feet but Thomas held tightly as possible.

 

“I don’t want him to hurt you either!” Thomas squeezed her wrist as best he could, though his grip was far stronger than yesterday and he was able to close his fingers, he was still far weaker than he should have been, like a baby.

 

Lucille smiled sadly at him. “You would do the same for me, my Thomas.  I don’t mind taking it.”

 

“It hurts worse when it’s you!” Thomas pleaded, but Lucille simply kissed him and forcibly extradited her wrist.  

 

“You won’t die from what he does to me.  You’re my most precious thing and I will keep you safe no matter what.”  She crossed the room as their father’s angry stomping grew louder. “Now hush!  If he comes any closer,” Lucille instructed Thomas, glancing over her shoulder, “hide under the bed and do not make a sound.”  

 

He nodded, clinging to the blankets.  He looked like one of the ghosts Lucille occasionally saw haunting the halls of Allerdale Hall, fragile and skeletal.  But the ghosts were frightening and Thomas was not. They were miners with their heads caved in or their flesh wrinkled and waterlogged.  But Thomas was whole, and so innocent and pure.  She would keep him safe.  He was all she had in the world; the only light in her life.  She vowed that as long as she lived, nothing would ever harm him; he would not join those miners.  

 

She met her father in the hallway. James Sharpe was red in the face and shaking with rage. He was a tall man, broad. At one point in his life it must have been muscle, but as he aged it was swiftly becoming fat.  Being overweight did nothing to minimize his strength, however. His hair was thick, curly, and black but his beard was graying.  His green eyes were on fire, insane, and his teeth were bared like a rabid animal.  It was the look he gave their mother shortly before snapping her bone under his boot the day he nearly killed her, the day he crippled her.

 

But Lucille stood her ground.  She was not afraid – she was angry.  This man tried to kill her Thomas.  This man tried to take from her the one and only thing that mattered in the world.  He wanted Thomas – perfect, beautiful Thomas – to die scared and alone in the cold.  Their father deserved to die for what he’d done.  He should have died before this for everything he’d done to them.  His unstoppable rage was matched by hers and she would not stand down.  Her hands knotted into fists at her sides.  

 

“You little bitch!” He rumbled dangerously.  

 

Before Lucille could do anything but open her mouth to reply, he caught her by the hair.   Lucille’s hair was long and he usually grabbed for it. But he usually used it to yank her around, not to pull her up off her feet as he did now.  He held her there, suspended off the ground.  The pain was intense, she thought her scalp might rip right off.  She writhed but it only made the pain more intense and he did not let her go.  With one hand she grabbed madly at the arm holding her while the other clung to her scalp as if to keep it on.

 

But the pain only made her rage worse.  As it grew so did her anger.  She snarled at him like a mad dog.

  

He struck her, slapping her across the face with the back of his hand.  Her head snapped back in his grip and it sent a spike of hot pain through her. She screamed, half in pain, half in anger, kicking out. He grabbed her chin with the same hand, forcing her still and tipping her head roughly so she could look only into his face.  His grip was punishingly tight.  “Where is he?  Where are you hiding him?!”  He spoke slowly in a voice shaking with barely contained ire.

 

“I’ll never tell you!” Lucille blinked back tears, her voice as slow and angry as his.   She punctuated her sentence by spitting at him.  The glob of saliva hit him on the cheek.  She expected it to boil off of his anger-hot face.  

 

He threw her heavily to the ground. Lucille landed on her elbow. A searing wave of pain shot through her, leaving a strange tingling behind, but she was already getting dizzily to her feet by the time he wiped the spittle off his face.  

 

“You cannot hide him beneath your petticoats forever!” Her father snapped, shoving her. “He’ll have to leave you sometime.  I’ll get him then!”  He turned his head and shouted down the hallway,  “Do you hear that, you poof!?  You aren’t safe!”

 

“You won’t!” Lucille answered, forcibly standing her ground, pushing back as best she could. “Not ever!”

 

“He’s a disgrace!  He doesn’t deserve to be alive!  If it wasn’t for your damn coddling, my embarrassment would have been long over!” He shoved Lucille hard into the wall, one huge hand around her thin throat. Lucille glared, unable to speak, unable to breathe.  

 

 _You don’t deserve to be alive,_ thought Lucille.  _You’re an embarrassment to the whole of the species._

 

“I won’t have that womanly milksop be my legacy and there is nothing you can do to stop me.  Nothing!” James Sharpe got very close to her face as he screamed the last word, close enough she could feel his spittle, but Lucille did not look away from him.  She didn’t even blink; she only narrowed her eyes to meet his challenge. 

 

He responded in kind, squeezing her throat more tightly.  She couldn’t breathe.  While he’d struck her dozens of times, perhaps hundreds or thousands of times over her short life, strangling was usually reserved for Thomas.  James Sharpe never seemed to think Lucille was worth the effort.  

 

The world was dimming around her, spinning, as she struggled for breath.  She wheezed and writhed, which only put more pressure on her throat.  She had to get out.  She would die like this.  She grabbed at his wrist as if to pull him away, then kicked out, hard, catching him in he gut.  

 

The feint paid off and he dropped her.  He fell back swearing and screaming.  Lucille fell as well, and used the wall to get back on her feet. Her voice was rough and painful as she spoke, “Thomas does not deserve a rabid animal like you for a father!  You’re not a man at all!”

 

The next strike caught her around the ear and for a time all she could hear was a distant, persistent ringing.  It threw her so off guard she barely even registered her father’s next assault until it was too late.  He slammed her face first into the floor. She heard the crack of her skull meeting the hard wood and felt blood on her forehead.  She thought madly for a moment that her brains were leaking out.  

 

He kept his hand on the side of her face, pushing down like a piston compressor.  He wrenched her arms up, twisting them behind her back and above her head, holding her wrists together and sending another jagged jolt of agony through her. She felt the weight of his shadow over her, more terrible than any of the phantoms in Allerdale Hall.  She fought but he was stronger, immobile as steel.  

 

The strike to her ear still left his voice buzzing as he spoke, “Someone needs to teach you to respect the man who brought your worthless arse into this world!” He pressed down as if he was trying to crush her skull like an eggshell. 

 

“Where?!” her father asked, very close to her ear; the single word was like an icicle.  

 

Lucille’s helplessness only made her fiercer.  She let out a wordless scream, which seemed to startle her father.  She sat upright with all of her strength and knocked back his looming jaw. She was panting and could feel the bruise blossoming over half of her face.  Wrath and fear tangled up, became inseparable, and made her more ferocious than she ever had been in her life. “I will never respect you,” she hissed, daring to talk back.  “And I’ll never let touch Thomas!”

 

“Wrong answer, stupid girl,” James Sharpe delivered a strike across her already swollen face, and her head snapped back. She tasted blood.  She put a shaking hand to her face and found her lips tender, skinned not just split. But she kept her ground. She would keep her ground.

 

“It’s true!  No one respects you!  They never will!” she screamed.  There was blood on her lips, the metallic taste was on her tongue.   It dripped down from her forehead, stinging her eyes, streaking down her cheeks like warpaint.  She knew she looked monstrous and she relished it.  She had to be a monster to fight one.  

 

He took another swing at her; she took it without falling. She grinned at him through blood.  

 

He hit her again.  She started to laugh as her eye swelled closed.  It spurred him on and Lucille lost track of the strikes.  She lost track of everything and eventually she couldn’t keep herself upright.  She fell onto her knees and then from her knees to the ground.  Her father came closer to her and she grabbed at his ankle.  He kicked her hard enough to send her sprawling like a rag doll. 

 

He glared down at her coldly, snorted, then abandoned his victim.   She wasn’t sure why he did so when he’d beaten her so soundly. He could have finished it there with a little more time. She could not have been far from death, she thought. 

 

But she still hadn’t passed out.  She wouldn’t pass out. She was still protecting Thomas and if her father had attempted to walk onward she would have grabbed at his pant leg, holding him back to her last breath. 

 

But there was no need.  He gave up.  He rotated his shoulder like an athlete would after a particularly difficult workout before turning on his heel. He started down the hall (she could hear his footsteps after he moved from her vision), stopped, and came back only to deliver a final kick to her stomach which made Lucille curl in on herself like a dying millipede.  Involuntarily her eyes squeezed shut, but she heard him leave, his footsteps became more distant, as did his voice as he called to Mary. 

 

For a long time Lucille could not get up.  She rolled herself onto her back and groaned. She lay there in a pool of her own congealing blood, her hair spread out beneath her like wings.

 

A dark moth landed next to her on the floor, its galea flickered over her blood, drinking it, drinking her, taking her in.  They weren’t like moths anywhere else in the world, Lucille knew that. She had looked, but the moths of Allerdale Hall were as special as the clay.  So much of Allerdale Hall was special.  So much of it was awful.

 

She thought the moths were haunted themselves, that the souls of those who died but were not ghosts were caught inside the moths.  She could prove it.  She’d seen the moths on the workers who died.  The moths came and took their souls.  The miners who had had moths come for them were not the ones who haunted the Sharpes, not as ghosts at least.

 

Lucille spent her life surrounded by the moths – her moths now.  Over the past year and a half she started breeding them, caring for them, killing and pinning them.  They were becoming her own dark creatures.  They grew to expect her, to fear her, to need her, like man did God.  But now this one was coming for her.  It had its compound eyes on her soul.  

 

With the little strength she had left she reached out and crushed the moth with the back of her hand.  It crunched under her knuckles and her bloody lip quirked.  She was not that easy to kill.  

 

Lucille staggered slowly to her feet.  She stumbled into the wall and stayed clinging to it, panting.  Just as she began to walk, dragging herself along the wall, her bedroom door creaked open.  

“Lucille?” Thomas whispered, one blue eye peering around the doorway.  

All the pain and anger and madness left Lucille’s body.  “Thomas,” she whispered and she opened the arm she wasn’t using to support herself.  “My darling Thomas.”

“Oh!” Thomas gasped.  “What did he do to you?”  He limped to Lucille’s side. They were so pathetic, weren’t they?  So vulnerable.  Hanging on by a single thread.  

 

She wouldn’t let them die.  She would not let them die.  But she couldn’t protect Thomas with her body again, not in this state.  What would she do if her father came back for her in the next few days?  

 

They staggered back to her room together. “I didn’t come out.  I did what you said.”

 

“Yes,” she nodded, “thank you, Thomas.”

 

“But look what happened to you!” Thomas pointed out pitifully.  

 

“It would have been worse if he’d killed you.  You wouldn’t even be able to run from him with your feet like this,” she pointed out as she eased herself into her chair by the fire.  

 

Despite being weak from illness and injury, Thomas saw to her in every way he could.  He found her a clean nightdress and helped her into it.  He tried to clean her wounds (although Lucille shooed him away and did it herself as Thomas’s fingers were too clumsy from their wounds and his fever). He got cold water to soothe the bruises blooming on her face and helped bandage her head.

 

“Is that alright?” Thomas asked as he finished up wrapping the bandage around her head.  “Not too tight?”

 

“No, no, it’s perfect,” she answered, tying it off.

  

“Do I have to go back to my room?” he asked.

 

Lucille shook her head.  “Stay with me.”

 

He nodded and smiled sadly.  He hugged her and she pulled him onto her lap. She loved the feeling of his body against hers.  It was the only comfort that existed in the world. 

 

“Thomas, we will be together forever and always,” she said very seriously, cradling him against her.  She couldn’t stand the thought of having him parted from her. 

 

He wrapped his arms around her neck and put his head on her chest, he nuzzled her like a baby animal seeking its mother.  “I hope so.”  

 

“I know so,” she said.  “We will always be together.  We stay together.”  

 

“Never apart,” Thomas agreed.  

 

“I like that,” Lucille smiled as Thomas snuggled next to her.  “Never apart.”  She said the words carefully, as if tasting them on her tongue.  It felt like an oath, a pact, it was theirs.  “We stay together.”

 

“Never apart,” Thomas recited like he was supposed to.

 

“Whenever you are afraid, remember that.”

 

“You too, Lucille, you remember it too,” Thomas said, looking into her eyes.  “If you’re ever afraid.”

 

She let out a soft sob; she wasn’t sure why, she didn’t know if she was afraid or happy.  She kissed his forehead, letting her tears fall into his hair.  “I will, I will, I always will.”  

 

“Lucille?   Lucille, please don’t cry,” he said in a worried whisper.  

 

“I won’t let him hurt you,” Lucille told him, “I won’t let him hurt either of us.  I promise.”

 

“How?” Thomas asked.  “He’ll kill you if you try to stop him again.”

 

“I don’t know,” Lucille sobbed.  “But I promise I will save us.”

 

And she cried.  She cried for what felt like hours, clinging to him.  What could she do?  What hope did they have?

 

***

 

When Lucille woke it was well into the afternoon, the sky was already darkening.  She would have slept longer if not for fierce rapping on her door. Her eyes snapped open and she first checked on Thomas, but he was still asleep beside her. His breathing was regular and deep.  He kept his wounded arm close to his side; the other was draped over Lucille’s chest.  Lucille tried to sit up and winced.  Dull pain shot throbbed through her wounded face and throat.  Her stomach and elbow ached. Her lips were so sore she didn’t think she would be able to speak.

 

The hammering on the door continued.  “Lucille!  Your father wants you to make him tea!  He is tired of waiting!”  It was Mary. Lucille would bet anything she was the one who told on her yesterday. She didn’t know whether it was because of Mary’s hatred for the children, her love for their father or her fear of him, but Mary always kept a sharp eye on Thomas and Lucille. Lucille thought it was the last, but she would never forgive Mary regardless.  Mary was just further proof there was no good in the world besides Thomas.

 

Lucille kissed Thomas gently and slipped out of bed.  She crossed to the window and threw it open, letting in the cold air.  Thomas pulled the blankets tighter around him.  The sounds of the afternoon broke through into their private little world: Men shouting, machinery whirring, horses whinnying, the crunching of snow and squelching of clay.  The world outside the window was white and black and red. Black smoke from the red kilns was belched into the white sky. Red miners left red footprints as black horses and black carts hauled red clay through the white snow.  The clay was beginning to leech upward out of the ground so that every wound left in the snow seemed to bleed.  

 

Lucille saw her father milling among the desperate miners, clean and fat among the filthy, starving masses. She hated him. She hated him more than anything else in the world. Her father’s green eyes rose to meet Lucille’s. 

 

Suddenly, Lucille knew what she had to do. It was in that moment everything came together.  She felt a wave of relief crash over her.  It was simple, and James Sharpe would be gone forever.  They would be safe.  

 

She would kill him. 

 

It was the only way to keep her promise to Thomas. It was the only way to keep Thomas safe. And they would be free. Oh God, they would be free of his abuse. The very idea made her heart feel lighter than it ever had.

 

“Lucille?” Thomas croaked. His good arm was gripping the spot where she was lying until a few moments ago.

 

“I’m here,” Lucille said gently. “I’m right here.”  She dressed quickly as she spoke, unashamed to unclothe in front of her brother. Why should she be? They were best friends, siblings, allies; they were practically the same person. “I need to go out for a bit.  Father is shouting for his tea.”

 

“Don’t go,” Thomas whispered, reaching out to grab her wrist.  

 

“If I don’t go it will only be worse, Thomas, you know that.”

 

Thomas nodded, but he didn’t let her go.  

 

“The sooner I leave, the sooner I will be back,” Lucille said.  Thomas’s grip loosened and he pulled the blanket up around himself.  “Don’t go downstairs. Don’t leave this room unless you absolutely must,” Lucille added.

 

“I will not,” Thomas swore. She knew he would keep that promise. He wouldn’t defy her. She kissed his forehead.  He smiled, leaning into her lips like a cat.

 

Lucille knew how she would kill their father. She was prepared for it, although she never thought she would use it on a human being.  She stooped and pulled a tiny cloth pouch out from her dresser drawer. She opened it very slightly to peer inside at the chalky white powder within.

 

 

Her own.  She was very proud of it.  She extracted it from the glaze they used in the kilns. It took her months to isolate it properly but she’d done it.  It looked just like the books said it should.  Lucille was always scientifically minded in a way that enraged their father and worried her tutors. Women shouldn’t be engaged in such interests.  It wasn’t healthy, it would ruin Lucille’s reproductive parts or her sanity, but she wasn’t to be deterred. Thus, when some kiln workers died, Lucille needed to know why.

 

When the cause of death was determined to be the arsenic content of the glaze Lucille took some for herself.  She stole a jar of glaze and experimented with it for most of the summer.  Finally, now as winter smothered fall, she figured it out, isolated the arsenic, and now she was armed with poison.  The kilns would be their father’s demise.  The clay, the Sharpe family’s lifeblood, would bring about his end. It was a poetic fate, almost to the point of melodrama.

 

She stuffed the pouch and its powder into her stocking and crossed to the door.  Mary started knocking again.  “LUCILLE!  Lucille, get out of bed!”

 

“What?” Lucille asked, throwing the door open.

 

Mary didn’t look at Lucille’s bruised face, “Good, you’re awake.”

 

“Coward,” Lucille growled hoarsely.

 

“Your father was expecting his tea a quarter of an hour ago,” Mary said angrily.  

“I’ll have it for him soon,” Lucille pushed passed Mary. She raced down to the kitchen, knowing she was already pushing her luck having delayed as long as she had.  She took the stairs two at a time, lifting her skirt so she didn’t trip in her haste. Her heart was pounding in her chest, fluttering like a butterfly struggling in a net. She was excited. Afraid. Joyful. She had to swallow the giggle that tried to force itself from her chest.  She wasn’t sure if the laugh was from anxiety or mirth.

In the kitchen she lit the stove and prepared the kettle. She went on tiptoe to get the tea tin off the shelf. The kitchen was empty and cold; the only sounds came from the house and grounds above and Lucille’s own pounding heart. She pulled the pouch from her stocking and stared at it. She didn’t know how much it would take. She didn’t know what it would do to him. A pinch to start with she decided, just a pinch, tiny, he wouldn’t even notice it. She poured a tiny amount of the white powder into the China cup. 

 

She watched it sink silently to the bottom of the cup. Would he taste it?  Would it dissolve?  Was it enough to kill him or would it just make him sick?  She added a tiny bit more. She stirred the tea with a small silver spoon (silver in color, not the actual metal – her father had pawned off most of the real silverware before Lucille could talk).  The powder rose and danced in the amber liquid and Lucille silently panicked, afraid that it might not dissolve. What if he saw it?  But then it began to shrink, go soft, and then it was gone. It looked just like an ordinary cup of tea, no different from the ones Lucille made for him every other day. 

 

She sighed with relief and added her father’s expected sugar.  From the cabinet she took a slice of the tea loaf that Thomas and she were never allowed to so much as smell and buttered it for her father.  She arranged it, the teacup and saucer, and teapot on a tray.  Lucille took a deep breath before she stepped out into the snow. She was glad it was cold and she could disguise her shaking anticipation for a shiver.

 

Her father gave her a sneer as she approached him with the tea tray. “What took you so long, girl?” He raised his hand and she flinched unconsciously. Her father laughed at her and took the cup. “No smart remarks today?”

 

“No sir,” Lucille said quietly.  Lucille watched him with bated breath as he brought the cup to his lips and took the first long sip. He didn’t react. He didn’t flinch. He drank it as if nothing was wrong. He didn’t vomit or choke or soil himself; he just glared at her from over the rim of his cup.

 

“What are you looking at?” He demanded, kicking snow in Lucille’s face. He rarely hit her in front of the men. He didn’t treat her kindly, but he never did anything that caught any attention.  That was why he never even acknowledged Thomas except in private when he could openly berate and beat him.

 

Lucille closed her unswollen eye against the snow and clay, raising the tray to block it. “Go inside before I drag you in,” he said taking another gulp of tea. “Leave the tray in my study.  Next time I send Mary for you, you’d best be punctual.  Or.  Else.”

 

“Yes sir,” said Lucille slowly, she didn’t want to look away from him. She wanted to keep watching.  But she obeyed him if only to keep him from getting suspicious. She spent the rest of the day with Thomas, but every so often she looked away or left to spy on their father.

 

Days passed. Lucille continued to poison her father’s tea twice daily. She tried to keep it consistent. At first she worried that she’d put in too little, that somehow it was a fluke that the kiln workers died from the unfired glaze, but her fears quickly dissipated. As the days passed her father began to weaken.

 

Of course he said nothing about it; he tried to hide any distress from the rest of the house, be it family or staff, and certainly from the miners.  But Lucille was watching.  It started with James Sharpe lingering too long on one task, a line of text, a spoken sentence, prolonged looks of confusion.  James Sharpe was a cruel man, but he was a shrewd one, and for once in his life that seemed to be failing him.  Then his appetite declined.  He refused meals, and while he kept drinking his tea, he didn’t have anything with it.  His time in the WC increased and when Lucille listened outside the door she heard him vomiting.  His hair thinned.  Lucille found chunks of it in the wastebasket.  

 

Symptoms once like flurries now came together to form a blizzard.  He could no longer pretend he wasn’t ill, but he could still deny help.  No one tried terribly hard to convince him to do otherwise.  

The end was coming.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Victorian doctors actually thought too much thinking -- especially about science -- would damage a woman's ability to have babies and might make them morally loose. The Victorian era was stupid.


	3. Chapter 3

James Sharpe could not explain what was happening to him.  He refused to admit how bad it had gotten over the past weeks to anyone, even himself.  But he knew he could no longer pretend it was just a stomach illness.  It wasn’t getting better.  It wasn’t going away. 

 

It was only getting worse.  

 

He felt dizzy most of the time now and relied on his cane for more than just fashion. He needed it to stay upright.  As humiliating as it was, James found he was as dependent on his cane as that bitch he married was on hers.  

 

He could barely keep any food down; he felt himself wasting away. And when he wasn’t throwing up his gut was in such pain he couldn’t even think of food.  Yesterday there had been something dark in his piss, something disturbingly like blood.  He tried to tell himself it wasn’t, that it was just a trick of the light, and flushed it all away.  

 

But now…

 

James stared into the basin.  He stood back as if afraid of the contents of the sink.  One shaking hand clutched his razor, the other was white-knuckled as it gripped the edge of the sink.  Shaving cream was still spread across his cheeks and throat, a single strip of pale skin exposed and cleaned of hair.  

 

He had barely begun the process of shaving when he felt lightheaded, sweaty. That familiar ache and wave of dizziness overwhelmed him and for the...he’d lost track of how many days this had been happening to him...nth time, he vomited. He didn’t know how he had anything left in his stomach beside the tea he drank in the hopes of calming his gut.  He started fasting entirely when he tired of constantly having to leave his work to throw up down the mines. The act exhausted him; but, then, it seemed everything exhausted him now.

 

This time it wasn’t yellow bile but blood. He had thrown up blood. He was only beginning to truly register this shock as the haze of queasiness passed when he heard a sound behind him. At first he thought it was Mary, whom his illness had caused him to neglect. He had been so sick he hadn’t even wanted her near him, let alone to fuck her.  Under normal circumstances just the sight of her walking, the thought of the body beneath the uniform, was enough, but as of late his body seemed only capable of feeling dizzy and ill.  He hadn’t even made her help him dress, ashamed of how thin and frail he’d become.  He turned, ready to angrily send the maid away before she saw too much, but instead of Mary he found Lucille.  

 

He hated her nearly as much as he hated the girl pretending to be his son.  He remembered the boiling rage he’d felt when the doctor – brought in all the way from London to ensure that the Sharpes’ future heir would be delivered safely and not murdered by some country doctor’s negligence – announced the child was a girl.  What good, James Sharpe thought then – as he did now – was a  _girl_?  He hadn’t even held the child, knowing full well he’d just dash its brains out on the ground for what it was.  

 

Beatrice didn’t want the thing either and they passed it off to the wet nurse who cared for Lucille as well as his second disappointment two years later.  That was years ago now.  He remembered the wet nurse, vaguely; she was a St. Bees woman in her early twenties, ugly, unmarried.  Her own child had died in the process of being born. What was her name again?  Theresa?  Something like that.  She was fired when Beatrice caught Lucille disgracing herself by sleeping in the servants’ quarters to be closer to the damned woman.  

 

Lucille stood in the doorway silently staring at him.  Lucille was strange.  Mad, James suspected.  He’d have nothing to do with her, maybe even sent her away, but she was cheaper than any servant and she made excellent tea.  

 

He had no interest in dealing with Lucille when he felt like this. He took a weak swat at her, further enraged by how limp-wristed the strike was.  She took the hit without even flinching.  The last bruises he’d given her had nearly faded, only a light dusting of purple across her cheek like rouge.  For the first time in her life he hadn’t given her new ones to replace them.  He felt rage and shame bubbling like vomit in his gut.  

 

Lucille seemed to be everywhere over the past two weeks. She was waiting behind corners, peering out windows, peeking in keyholes, clinging white-knuckled to railings. Wherever he looked, there she was. Her green eyes locked on him, huge, unblinking, like a praying mantis’s. He half expected to see her when he awoke in the dark; cold, clammy, alone. She had even started appearing in his dreams.  He woke up every night remembering only those bug’s eyes.

 

“What do you want?” He snapped. She must have noticed the change in him, even that cunt of a wife had through her haze of laudanum and ether. And if she noticed, the walls themselves probably did.

 

Lucille didn’t answer, she just raised the tray she was carrying.

 

His tea.

 

Of course.

 

How could he have forgotten?  Being this sick, he had to drink. He had to keep his strength up somehow. He had already lost so much weight that the peasants were beginning to whisper. He snatched the cup from the tray. “Leave it,” he told her.

 

Lucille put the tray on the table in the hall but did not leave. She stayed silent. He never hated her more.  Was that a smile?   _Was she smiling?!_

 

“GO!” he screamed as loudly as he could.  He felt his gut writhe and the world spin as he rounded on her.  He clung to the sink for support.  

 

“Feeling ill?” Lucille asked in response.

 

“How  _dare_  you, you little bitch!” He roared, finding a new wave of strength in his outrage.

 

He grabbed her by the hair and yanked. He relished the fact that he was still strong enough to cause her pain. He couldn’t knock her off her feet but the jerk was enough to make her shout.  He released her and she ran off casting a final look back over her shoulder.

 

But it took so much out of him. James was breathing hard from doing something that once came so easily to him. He once barely broke a sweat while shattering his wife’s leg so badly the bitch would never walk straight again even if she lived to be a hundred. He could hold the brat off the ground by her hair like a rabbit by the ears.  He could break through skin with the single whip of a riding crop.  But now a simple swat at her left him panting and staggering. 

 

His vision blurred. He turned and threw up in the sink again. More blood. He wiped the blood and bile from his lips. He ran the water, clutching the tap, to wash the vomit down the drain. His hands were shaking, blurry in his vision.  The world spun.  He felt his limbs give out.  His skin felt like it was on fire.  And he fell.  

 

He knew nothing else for some time.  

 

When he awoke he was lying in bed. Three of the girls (Mary, Elizabeth, even Jane), the butler, Fredrick, and – damn her – Lucille stood around him. Mary was wiping his forehead. “Master Sharpe?  Sir James?  Can you hear me?”

 

He went to swat her hand away, but he found his arm weighed a thousand pounds. “Get away from me!”

 

“Sir, you were having some kind of fit. Lucille found you on the bathroom floor,” Fredrick nodded towards the girl. She was staring at him, the same unblinking wide-eyed stare.

 

She nodded.  Didn’t she? It may have just been how badly his own head shook when he attempted to lift it from the pillows. Was she smiling?

 

He fell back against the bed, but managed to scare them all away from him with a few harsh words.  All except Lucille.  She stood in the hallway just beyond the door peering in through the crack.  He didn’t have the strength to chase her away.  

 

He never rose from the bed again. 

 

He lasted three more days but didn’t have the strength to so much as lift a finger by the end. 

 

He saw Thomas limp past his door arm in arm with Lucille.   _Damn that boy,_ thought James,  _the ponce_.  How dare he survive.  Thomas grew stronger the weaker his father became, like he was taking his strength.   _Damn that weak pathetic child_ …but now James was hardly better than he was.  Thomas didn’t pause to look in at his father, he simply walked by, toddling like he was learning how to walk again.  The look of terror, the look of fear that James always saw on his son’s face, was gone.  Lucille dared to glance in and James swore she was smiling.

 

Lucille. 

 

Then there was Lucille.

 

By the final day James swore she was always there.  _Always_. She was in the room with him, waiting just out of arm’s reach as if she was counting down the final hours of his life, like the Grim Reaper with his hourglass.  And now he knew she was smiling. Now there was a terrible excitement in her eyes like she was the devil himself, relishing James’s discomfort, his slow death. He could not even call out to force her away.  

 

She never spoke.  She never blinked.  She was just there like a silent horrible specter.  It made him think that perhaps the rumors about the ghosts were true…

 

There were those who said Allerdale Hall was haunted.  Many, who did.  James Sharpe grew up here, lived here all his life with the exception of the brief respites he had at school as a boy or on business in the colonies now, and he had never seen a single thing one might call a ghost.  

 

His mother claimed she saw her own mother-in-law dressed in red, hollow and hungry and broken-limbed as she had been when she died.  The two women, his grandmother and mother, hated each other.  When James’s father was away fighting in Africa the old woman died in James’s mother’s care after falling down the stairs.  

No…no that wasn’t right.  That was what his mother trained James to say.  His grandmother wasn’t dead when she fell, regardless of what James’s father was told.  

 

His mother found her there, alive, writhing, in the wine cellar at the base of the stairs.  She had broken her bones and could not get up on her own.  His grandmother called out to her daughter-in-law, demanded she help her.  But James’s mother did not.  James remembered her staring down the stairs, eyes wide. Then she took a deep breath and slowly closed the door, locked it, and left her there.  Young James was calmly told to ignore his grandmother.  It took days for her to die.   But once the screaming stopped the cellar door was unlocked and the body was “discovered.”  By the time his father returned from fighting the Ashanti she was long dead.  

 

James’s mother killed herself years later while James was at university.  In the suicide note she claimed her mother-in-law’s ghost drove her to it.  But she was mad.  

 

Since then he heard his own brats mutter about seeing dead miners and kiln workers and a woman with a rope around her neck.  But he always assumed they were perhaps just as mad as his mother had been.  Jane screamed about a man made of clay who stood over her bed and Fredrick refused to go into the wine cellar alone, but the lower class were always superstitious and stupid.

 

But now he wasn’t so sure.  Now Lucille seemed very much like a ghost, worse than the broken grandmother his mother swore she saw.  

 

She was a ghost or an angel or perhaps an immense hungry moth, a human-sized version of the dark moths he’d seen since his youth.  

 

He would not have believed Lucille was real if she didn’t keep feeding him, giving him tea, taking away his sick when he was able to get his head over the bucket.  She never touched him, not with her bare fingers, but she continued to care for him as attentive as any doctor.  

 

Was this what Lucille did for his drunkard cunt of a wife whenever she took to her bed?  A few years ago, when he’d crippled Beatrice she locked herself up in the master bedroom for weeks, months even.  She never let Lucille far out of her sight. She managed to save Beatrice but he didn’t think she would do the same for him.  He would die here under those staring insect eyes.

 

Lucille was there, silently looming over him.

 

Lucille was there at the very end.

 

It was the middle of the night. He hadn’t slept.  The past two days he had done nothing but sleep; it made him feel like he was already dead.  But now, as he lay there in an agony he could not describe, he wished sleep would take him again.  He wished for death.  

 

And just as that thought formed there was a sound, a floorboard creaking just beyond his consciousness, and he opened his eyes.  It took a moment for his vision to clear.  At first all he saw was a light.  He thought for a mad moment that he was already dead and this was the light so many professed to see when they were close to death. 

 

But his eyes focused and he realized it was Lucille standing there holding a small lit candle.  The children were not allowed candles; they were too valuable to be wasted on the likes of Lucille and Thomas.  Had he been well he would have snatched it from her and burned her with the wax for what she’d done. 

 

 How could she have gotten it?  

 

His sick mind began to whirl.  Maybe it wasn’t Lucille at all.  As she stood there, enshrined by her halo of light, she looked like the angel of death.  Her face was shadowed by the low flame and it looked like a skull.  Her eyes were cold and shining.  She looked impossibly ancient, with those eyes that had seen everything, far more than she could have being…how old was Lucille?  Ten?  Eleven?  

 

She was there, watching silently.  

 

His breath was coming now in short bursts, rattling through him.  Each breath hurt. His stomach was in agony. His mind felt foggy.

 

Lucille was there, watching silently.

 

He coughed, choked, bile rising in him.  She didn’t move.  She didn’t blink.  What did she know that he didn’t?  What was she waiting for?  Fear gripped his ailing heart, writhed in his ruined guts.  

 

Lucille was there, watching silently.

 

He tried to call out to her.  To say her name, whether that was Lucille or Death or Lucifer, he did not know.  He wasn’t sure which he said, if he said anything at all.  There was a ringing.  A bell.  A death toll.  He could hear it.  

 

All was dark but for that aureola around the creature.  Was it really Lucille?  He wasn’t so sure.  What he had thought was her hair became wings sprouting from her back, folded behind her head, as black as a crow’s.  The thing he thought was a scar was a crack in ivory white bone.  The red he thought were lips was blood smeared across the skull.  Her eyes, as green as his own, found his.  He tried to scream for help.  

 

Lucille, or whatever it was, was there, watching silently.

 

The world closed in on him, collapsed, falling away like a loose stone underfoot. There was fog.  Gloom.  Darkness.  Dimming even the candle flame.

 

James Sharpe was never a praying man. He did not believe in God or in an afterlife. It never bothered him before. He could laugh at the fools who prayed for the souls of their dead.  But now, faced with this dark angel, he was no longer so confident.  

 

Perhaps his lifetime of self-indulgence and violence was leading to this, his death and his damnation, alone but for this specter by his bedside.  He spent all of his adult years – and many of those before – whoring, gambling, taking what he wanted, and indulging even his basest and most violent desires.  He had enjoyed life, would he be able to say the same about death?  

 

The angel was there, watching silently

.  

_No!_

 

_Oh God, no!_

 

What could he do? There had to be something.   _Something_.  Some hope of salvation.  He would pray.  He would try to confess all those thousands of sins.  But he could not even speak to beg for forgiveness.  

 

There was no one who would pray for him.

 

He tried to say something, to plead, but it only came out as a low groan.

 

The angel’s blood lips spread in a smile, showing all its bright white teeth. Its mouth moved but he could hear nothing. And that grin and those unblinking shining eyes were the last things he ever saw.


	4. Chapter 4

Lucille stood at the bedside watching her father’s body and mind break down.  His breathing stopped.  His eyes became as glassy as a doll’s. His lips, speckled with vomit, were pale and his tongue turned purple.  For a long time he seemed to twitch and stir, but when she dared to touch his wrist to find his pulse, she felt nothing.  The whole ordeal was very much like those of the animals she slaughtered.  

 

Death took them the same way.   That was fascinating to her, the fact that a human being, a pig, a chicken, a rabbit, a goose, all died the same way, all looked the same in death.  She was compelled to observe him the way she once did with her animals and with the same cold disregard.  She had no affection for the man this lump of flesh had once been, nothing held her back from examining the corpse.  She checked over his body, looking for how this death varied from the countless others she’d seen. 

 

She reached out and closed his eyes when she could no longer bear them looking at her.  She would never need to fear his gaze again.

 

 _Never._   

 

Thomas was free!  She was free!   _They were free!_   They were safe from this monster, finally!  Safe.  It was a feeling alien to Lucille.  The elation Lucille felt was unlike anything she’d ever experienced, it was almost like the rapture of saints.  

 

She and Thomas were finally safe and she had done it.  She had done to James Sharpe what he had always threatened to do to her poor sweet Thomas.  She felt so strong.  “You will never strike him again!” she hissed at the corpse.  “You will never hurt either of us!  We will be  _happy!_ ” 

 

She watched a moth detach from the wall and land on the dead man’s face, crawling towards his eye, proboscis probing.  A sudden sound startled her and Lucille had to bite her tongue to keep from making a noise. She blew out the candle, placed it on his end table, and ran from the room fighting back a giddy giggle.  She raced down the hall until she reached her room. She quickly closed the door behind her and nearly collapsed to the ground laughing.

 

Thomas sat bolt upright in the dark; he looked frightened in the gray predawn light. “Lucille?” He whispered. “Lucille, is that you?”

 

“Yes,” she answered, still laughing madly. “Yes it is!  It’s me!”

 

“Why are you...?  What’s so funny?” There was rarely much time or place for laughter amidst the population that haunted Allerdale Hall. There was rarely any reason to even smile.  A worried smile now crossed Thomas’s features but she could tell it was more fear and anxiety than mirth.  That would change soon.  

 

Lucille rose to her feet feeling practically dizzy with glee as she crossed to him. She felt like she was floating. She kissed him all over – his chin, his cheeks, his forehead, his lips, perhaps a dozen brief little kisses, then hugged him close. “Thomas!  Oh, Thomas!  He never will harm you again!  He’s dead!  Father is dead!”

 

“What?!” Thomas clapped a hand over his mouth to keep his voice down. “Are you sure?”

 

“I saw him die,” Lucille promised. She kissed him again, ruffled his hair, and then hugged him tightly to her chest.

 

“When?  How?” Thomas asked, still stunned. “Are you really sure?” He repeated thickly.  

 

“Let me write my notes down before I forget,” Lucille said slipping out of bed and crossing to her notebook.  She’d used it to keep track of the amount of arsenic she used on their father and now she cataloged the final results.  She never saw a dead human body before, her world was too small, populated by too few people for deaths to be common, and it piqued her scientific curiosity.  Thomas didn’t object and waited patiently as Lucille wrote down everything she remembered about her father’s final departure, every detail.  Once while watching her take her notes on a butterfly she’d found and pinned Thomas asked her if she was going to be a scientist.  Lucille had been touched by the sentiment as much as she was charmed by her brother’s naïveté.  She’d had to tell him that women couldn’t do such things, at best she could be a nurse and most likely she’d be forced to become another man’s wife.  The idea of being separated from Thomas disgusted and terrified her then as it still did.  There was no one else in the world she wanted to spend her life with.

 

As she cataloged her father’s death she felt Thomas watching her and knew his heart must have been pounding as hard as hers.  He must have been eager for details.  She closed her book putting her pen between the pages to mark her place and slid it safely into a desk drawer.   She crossed back to Thomas, climbing into bed beside him and holding him close; so close their beating hearts were pressed together and she wished vaguely there wasn’t cloth and skin and flesh and bone to keep their souls apart.  

 

“He’s really dead?” Thomas whispered after a brief pause.  

 

“Yes. His illness finally took him,” Lucille answered smoothing a hand through his hair.

 

Thomas laughed. It was a sweetest sound Lucille had ever heard, so genuine, so happy, so full.  Lucille laughed too.  “Oh, Lucille!” Thomas said joyously. “Is this what being happy feels like?”

 

“I think so,” she told him.

 

“I hope it never goes away!” Thomas said, and he kissed her cheek. “Let’s dance!” He pulled at her wrist. “I want to dance!”

 

“Are you well enough?” Lucille asked nervously as Thomas stumbled out of bed.  “Your feet are still injured.”

 

“I can do anything!” Thomas told her with a wide childish grin.  She’d never seen him smile quite like that before and she hoped he never stopped.  They began their awkward waltz.

 

Thomas and Lucille were never allowed to attend the Sharpes parties, but they still watched from the top balcony.  Their parents never danced, James Sharpe was too busy with the wives of his guests and Beatrice’s leg made even slow walking difficult, let alone dancing.  Instead Thomas and Lucille watched beautiful strangers dances waltzes, Schottisches, and two-steps.  They were spectacular.  Thomas was even more taken with the dancers than Lucille. The waltz particularly delighted him.  Thomas memorized the steps and he and Lucille mastered them together. They were nowhere near as graceful as the adults they saw so far below them and it was always made so much more gauche by Thomas being far smaller than Lucille.  She had to lead despite it being the man’s role.  

 

But Lucille thought they must have looked twice as beautiful as the proper dancers because she and Thomas loved each other and she didn’t think anyone else in the world really loved anyone.  It was just Thomas and she.  When they danced they were in another world, a world made only for and only of them.  A perfect world, Lucille thought.

 

Despite his young age Thomas excelled at waltzing.  Both she and Thomas enjoyed music; Lucille played piano and Thomas danced like an angel.  Today Thomas was not so sure on his feet.  His fingers were completely healed, smooth and soft as ever, but his feet still looked burned and it hurt him to put pressure on his toes.  He was still sickly though the fever had faded, and he tired quickly.  But when Lucille offered to stop after a few steps Thomas shook his head.

 

They waltzed to the music only they could hear until Thomas’s fatigue tripped him and they fell back onto Lucille’s bed, laughing and breathless.  Thomas landed on Lucille and she kissed him before he rolled off of her onto the sheets beside her.  She could still feel the ghost of his lips on hers and she touched his smiling mouth gently, tenderly, just for a fleeting moment.  Then they both dissolved into laughter again.  With effort they managed to contain themselves for fear of being discovered.

 

They let Mary find the body. James Sharpe was to be awakened with the sun, now swiftly rising.  Every day he had been bedridden he ordered Mary to prop him up by the window so he could watch the miners as they trudged to their miserable work. They would be arriving soon and Mary wouldn’t dare be late for the task.

 

Lucille, ever the spy, would later overhear Mary describe the experience to Jane. As Mary described it later, she entered the room and called out to her master. When he gave no answer she became worried. She tried to rouse him verbally three times before she dared to cross the chamber and shake him. She found him cold. His lips and cheeks were gray. Mary was an orphan and knew well what death looked like. She knew her employer was dead.  That was when she screamed.  

 

She was hardly upset that the man who had forced himself on her more times than she could count was finally dead. “Saved me the trouble of doing it,” she had said. But Lucille had seen what her father did to the maid several times since the incident in the library.  If Mary didn’t kill him then, she never would.  Perhaps, Lucille thought, she was right and Mary hadn’t disliked their father as much as she pretended.  Or perhaps she just wasn’t brave enough.

 

She wasn’t strong like Lucille.  She didn’t have anyone she loved to protect.  Lucille was strong because Thomas made her strong. They complemented each other.  They needed each other.  They were dependent on one another to work, like the interlocking gears in one of Thomas’s toys.

 

When Mary found the body she shrieked so loudly it woke the whole of the household and everyone (including Lucille and Thomas) came running. Or at least everyone who could run did so. Their mother staggered in on her cane long after the others had arrived and gathered around the corpse.  Beatrice Sharpe had a bottle of laudanum clasped in one bony hand, the head of her cane in the other. She was starting her drinking early, Lucille silently noted.  The children remained in the doorway, grinning, while the servants stood gathered around the corpse, whispering furiously.

 

“What is the meaning of this noise?” asked Lady Beatrice, snarling from the doorway. “Have you any idea what time it is?!”

 

“Not too early for her to start her drinking,” Lucille muttered into Thomas’s ear.  They both giggled quietly.  Their mother raised her cane against her and Lucille shuddered away. But Beatrice didn’t strike her, perhaps due to her early morning aches, as Lucille could see no other reason that she hadn’t done it, but Beatrice’s mercy only added to Lucille’s glee.  

 

“The master is...the master is dead...” said Fredrick carefully.

 

“What?!” their mother nearly dropped her bottle.  She limped into the room and the servants parted for her like identically poled magnets. Lucille crept forward, dragging Thomas along with her. He seemed ambivalent, curious but nervous. It was an expression he often had, and Lucille tried to help him. She didn’t want him to go anywhere alone, he would always be safe with her.  He needed her by his side, but together they could take on the world.  He could approach their father’s corpse; after all, it couldn’t hurt them now.

 

Lucille felt Thomas’s pulse pounding under her hand. It was understandable.  Her heart was fluttering too.

 

Beatrice peered down at the carcass that had up until very recently been her husband. Her thin puckered lips formed the briefest smile.  It was more of a smile than Lucille or Thomas had ever before seen on their mother’s face. Their father was different.  Lucille had seen his ugly malicious smile far too often.  He delighted in taking, in hoarding, in his displays of affluence and power, in causing pain, but their mother was never happy.  In some ways it made her even more terrifying.  But now…now there was a flinty glint of amusement in her eyes.  And it was horrible.

 

“No sense in letting it rot here,” she said to the servants. “Take it outside.  If I see so much as a single string missing from his nightshirt, I will have you arrested and hanged for theft.  You,” she pointed at Mary, who flinched. “You go to town and fetch the doctor. Tell him whatever you want, I don’t care; tell him I want him here at once.” Beatrice limped closer and glared down at the body. “This is better than you deserve,” she growled at the corpse.  She spat on its face with a look of hateful glee.  Then she glanced around at the servants and the children as if she’d forgotten they were there. “Go!  All of you!  Get to work!”

 

They scattered. Fredrick and Cook wrapped the corpse in the bedsheets and lifted it like a heavy wheat sack between them.  Mary left the room to dress and Rodney, the groom, went to ready a horse for her.  

 

Lucille and Thomas ran off too, back to Lucille’s room. She shut and locked the door behind them and turned to face the still smiling Thomas.

 

“What do you think mother will do with--?” Thomas began but Lucille cut him off.

 

“Thomas I need to tell you something. Something exciting. But you mustn’t tell anyone. Not a soul. Do you promise?”

 

Thomas looked confusedly at her. His smile flickered then slowly faded. “Is it...what sort of thing is it?  Good or bad?”

 

“Very, very good. But other people might think it’s bad because they do not understand. They wouldn’t. They won’t.  But you’ll understand. You always will. Won’t you?”  She crouched down next to him, holding his face in both hands, her fingers caressing his cheeks.

 

“Yes...” He said carefully. “But...”

 

“Shh,” Lucille whispered. “You’ll keep our secret?  Just between the two of us?  It will be ours. It will be just for us and no one else.  You’ll keep it, won’t you?  You’ll keep it close?”

 

“Yes!” said Thomas adamantly, clearly moved by her words. “Yes of course!”

 

“You’ll die before you tell?” she pressed.

 

“Yes,” he said more slowly, more ambivalent to agree this time.  

 

“Tell me so, Thomas,” Lucille needed to hear him say those words, to promise her.  His doubt worried her.  If he told anyone it could be – would be – the end.  They would probably hang her like they did all murderers.  Or if they did not kill her they could lock her up away from Thomas for the rest of her life.  That would be worse.  

 

“I will die before I tell. Please, will you tell me the secret?  Please?”

 

She smiled at him. “ _Our_  secret, not  _the_  secret.” She rubbed his cheek gently.  There was a pause, Lucille took a breath, then, “I killed him.”

 

“What?” Thomas smiled but as he saw she was serious it vanished.  “But he...he was ill?” Thomas seemed to be asking rather than stating it.

 

“Yes. I made him ill.”

 

“How?”

 

“Poison. Do you remember those workers who died in the spring?  They were poisoned.”

 

“Did you do that too?!”  Thomas tried to pull out of her grip but Lucille was far stronger and wouldn’t let him go.  She couldn’t let him go until he understood.  She had to make him understand.  

 

“No, no! of course not!” she soothed him. “I am not a monster, Thomas. I am still the same Lucille. Father let them die because he didn’t tell them he switched to a glaze with more arsenic in it.  Do you know what arsenic is?”

 

Thomas shook his head.

 

“It’s an element, a metalloid; it’s something like a metal, but different.  It’s in all sorts of things.  I’ve read all about it.  People use it in medicine sometimes; some ladies rub it on their faces to make themselves whiter. It’s used to change the color of the clay, but it’s poison.  That’s what it’s really meant for.”

 

“And it was in the glaze?” Thomas asked.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Why?”

 

“To make it white, so it wasn’t the color of blood, I expect,” Lucille shrugged.  

 

“Father knew?”

 

“About the arsenic?  I think so, yes.  He certainly didn’t seem surprised, did he?”

 

Thomas shook his head.  “Father was a murderer,” he told Lucille.

 

“I know,” she answered.  “And worse than that he tried to kill you and take my perfect Thomas away from me.  I couldn’t let him do that, could I?”

 

Thomas smiled sadly. “No.  No, I don’t want to leave you either.”  He paused, the smile vanishing from his face again.  He looked solemn, worried almost, then pensive.  He furrowed his brow, clearly deep in thought.  “Father had to die, didn’t he?” he said, finally, slowly, as if he were working through the thought as he said it. “The queen kills murderers.”

 

He said that in such a way that it made Lucille almost feel she was the queen he meant, rather than Queen Victoria.  Lucille let go of Thomas’s face and hugged him close.  “I love you.”

 

“I love you too, Lucille,” he said, wrapping his arms around her and hugging her back.

 

She squeezed him more tightly and felt him bury his face in her shoulder.  They stayed there for a few moments before Lucille pulled back, holding him at arms length, her hands on his shoulders.  She looked into his wide blue eyes.  He looked like a china doll, with that perfect curly black hair, those big blue eyes, that pale skin.  He was perfect.  

 

She had to make sure he understood the gravity of all this.  “You understand why you cannot tell, don’t you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Why?” she asked.

 

“Because people will think it’s bad.  Killing people is bad.”

 

Lucille brushed a stray hair from his face. “Sometimes you must do bad things so good things can happen.  I’m not bad, am I, Thomas?”

 

A pause. “…No…no, you aren’t.  Good people can do bad things.”

 

“Right,” Lucille said, “and some bad things aren’t  _really_  bad.  Sometimes you must do them, and then good things come.  It only seems bad.    Remember when your fingers hurt when I was rubbing them, but then you could move them again?”

 

“Yes,” Thomas answered obediently.  He was listening to her raptly, like an eager student at lessons.

 

“I didn’t want to hurt my Thomas, but I had to so he didn’t lose his cute little fingers.  Do you understand?”

 

“Yes,” Thomas repeated, his fingers reflexively closing at mention of losing them.  

 

“And now with father dead we will be allowed to get better and he cannot hurt us anymore.”

 

“Yes!” Thomas agreed more adamantly this time, “yes, that’s true!”

 

“But no one else will believe that.  They won’t think that that’s a good enough reason.  If you tell, they’ll take us away and lock us up forever and ever,” she told him.  “They may even kill us.” They wouldn’t kill or lock him up of course, he didn’t do anything, but Lucille wanted to make sure he understood how bad it would be.  

 

His eyes went wide.  “I promised I wouldn’t tell!  I still won’t!  I’ll never ever tell!  I won’t let them do anything to you!” 

 

“Then I am safe.  And I’ll keep you safe too.” She kissed him on the forehead.  “Mother has sent for the doctor.  It will be over soon and we needn’t even think of him again.”

 

***

 

When the doctor arrived hours later, the discarded body was already frozen.  He merely glanced at it, confirmed James Sharpe was dead, and handed their mother a little slip of paper saying so.  Lucille and Thomas watched the whole thing from the second floor balcony, hiding in the shadows.  Once the paper was handed off, Lady Beatrice escorted the doctor back out into the cold without offering him a warm drink or food.  He was there all of ten minutes.  

 

She closed the door and locked it with one of the many keys hanging from the huge ring she wore at her waist.  “I know you’re somewhere listening, girl,” Beatrice said, her back to Lucille.  

 

Lucille stiffened.  

 

“You’re as insidious as those hideous moths,” she added.  “Come down here.  You have a job to do.”

 

Lucille detached herself from her hiding spot.  Thomas made to follow but Lucille put her hand to his chest and shook her head.  If Thomas didn’t have to be involved she wouldn’t force him to be. “Yes, mother?” she asked quietly.  

 

“Take a basket and strip the corpse.”

 

“Strip it?” she repeated.  

 

“Are you deaf, girl?  Yes!  Strip it!  Take his clothes, his jewelry, his gold teeth!  Anything of value!” Beatrice said, leaning heavily on her cane.  Lucille swore she could hear Thomas shudder at their mother’s words, but their mother continued as if she hadn’t heard.  “You haven’t much time before it bloats and you’ll have to chop off his fingers to get his rings.”  She turned and walked away, leaving Lucille to the task at hand.  

 

Lucille set to it hastily in the bitter cold.  It was difficult work since the body had been left in the cold for so long, but Lucille found her skills as a butcher could be applied here, too.  With pliers, bone saw, knife, hammer, and her own ingenuity and strength, she was able to take everything of value from James Sharpe.  He looked so much smaller than he had in life and Lucille found herself taking dark pleasure in this final act of humiliation.  She found she enjoyed it, literally cutting him down to size.  Or, at the very least, she found something cathartic in it.  As if she was giving back the years of abuse he’d doled out to his children.  

 

The only thing Lucille did not put into the basket was her father’s ring.  It wasn’t the wedding band, which she would return to her mother, but his gold ring set with his initials.  Lucille knew their mother would keep nothing of him, none of his belongings.  But Lucille wanted something, some trinket, a memento mori.  She liked to collect things and it wasn’t as if she could – or even wanted to – preserve her father’s corpse.  This would do.  A memory of what she had done and what they had gained because of it.  She slipped the ring into her pocket, smirked at the ruined corpse, turned and went back inside.

 

Lucille found their mother at the piano playing something ancient and soulless.  A song Lucille hated.  “Mother?”

 

Beatrice looked up, enraged, “I gave you a task to be done.”

 

“I’ve finished it.” Lucille held up the basket.

 

Her mother snatched it from her.  “You are not allowed in here,” she said, “not ever again.  I don’t want you in here.  Do you understand?”

 

“Y-yes,” Lucille said, although she did not.  

 

“Good.  Tell your brother the same,” she began to shift through the contents of the basket.  Lucille had already slipped from the room when her mother called to her, “His ring!  Where is his ring?!”

 

“It’s in the basket, mother,” Lucille answered meekly.

 

“The other ring, damn you, girl!  You know very well which one I meant!” Beatrice shouted.

 

“It wasn’t on his body, mother,” Lucille lied.  She could practically feel the ring burning in her pocket.  Her prize.  Now she just had to get it past Beatrice and it would really be hers.  “Perhaps someone stole it.”

 

The ring was never found and Beatrice fired Mary for the theft. But since Mary didn’t have it in her possession and Beatrice could not prove she ever did the law was never involved.  Lucille hid the ring away, not even showing it to Thomas for fear their mother would somehow find out take it from her.  She was as afraid of Beatrice as she had been of James; more so, in some ways.  The difference had been that Beatrice was not so quick to attack and more likely to isolate herself from the world.  But something seemed to be changing, as if she was growing bolder and braver now that James Sharpe was dead.

 

Beatrice sold off everything Lucille brought inside.  She didn’t sell anything else at first, only what had been on her husband the day he died.  She wanted desperately to keep up appearances of wealth, Lucille could tell.  She used the money to buy more ether and laudanum, scotch and wine.  After Mary’s dismissal, she fired most of the other servants and the few who remained came less often now.  

 

The ground was too hard to bury James Sharpe properly and Beatrice refused to pay for a coffin.  Fredrick and Lucille dug a shallow hole in the family cemetery, just enough to fit the corpse.  The body, dressed only its underclothes and wrapped in a sheet to hide how Lucille had mutilated it, was unceremoniously dumped into the grave.  It landed face down and no one in the assembled group made an effort to right it.  There was a momentary pause, a pregnant quiet.  Lucille watched all those present breathe.  It was only she, her brother, her mother, and Fredrick.  No one said a word.  There was nothing to say.  He was burning in Hell now and they all knew it.  Lucille and Fredrick buried him.  The clay was already soaking into the grave, staining the sheet.

 

From the outside it looked like a glorious tomb, marked with a large headstone in the family cemetery.  But beneath the ground it was only a desecrated and nearly naked corpse in a sheet.  It was like the Sharpes in a way, from the outside they seemed so glorious, so exquisite, the old elite, but beneath the surface they were ugly, twisted, broken, and stained with red.

 

After this pathetic funeral Lucille and Thomas retreated to Lucille’s room.  She washed the dirt from her hands and pulled off her soiled dress and petticoats.  She pulled on another dress, warm and clean, and kicked the other aside.  She would never wear it again.  It was true they still had their mother to contend with, but the constant immediate danger posed by James Sharpe was gone.  It was as if dawn was coming after years of night.  The sun was still distant, but she could see its rays on the horizon.

 

Thomas was sitting on her bed.  Lucille looked at him and smiled.  She playfully tackled him, tickling his sides.  He laughed loudly and half-heartedly struggled against her.  They played like this until Lucille let up and Thomas grinned up at her.  “Lucille, you saved us.”  

 

“It can only get better,” Lucille said.  “You’ll see.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, the holidays happened and all that. We're nearly finished now, just one more chapter.


	5. Epilogue

She was wrong.  

 

It got worse.  

 

At first the changes that followed their father’s death didn’t seem terrible to Lucille and Thomas.  Beatrice Sharpe pawned off what had been on her husband’s body and used the proceeds to feed her addictions.  She fired all but one servant, old Finley the groundskeeper, who Thomas kept on after it was all over.  She locked off much of the house, though not as much as Thomas and Lucille would. She largely ignored her children.  

 

A little more than a month after James Sharpe’s death his widow ate through the narcotics she’d purchased with that last surge of money.  That was the day her tolerance for her children ended.   She told them to gather up their things.  She told them to wait in the nursery.  She closed the door on them, turned the key, and that was that.  

 

Thomas and Lucille were permanently confined to the attic.  They would not set foot outside their prison for four long years.  The next time Lucille left the attic she left a cleaver in her mother’s skull.  

 

After their mother’s murder came the worst period of all.  Lucille spent seven years in Hell.  Seven years separated from Thomas, imprisoned in an asylum.  It changed her, scarred her in ways she could not express; it made her what she was, this twisted dark creature hiding in the shadows.  

 

But it was over now.  She was freed when she became an adult at age twenty-one.  Lucille and Thomas were reunited.  They had been so for nearly five years come November of 1890.  

 

So much had changed since they were children.   _They_  had changed.  Many of the scars had faded and healed.  Lucille, of course, had new ones from her life in the asylum.  But their childhood wounds were gone, turned to scars.  The wound on his arm Thomas received in the forest had healed and become an immense scar, first a great purplish canyon, then, by the time Lucille was sent away, it was a pink ditch, but now it was almost imperceptible, the slightest snow-white line on his pale skin.  Even the scar on Lucille’s lip was smaller and paler, but now she had one above her eyebrow too.  Thomas’s feet healed without any permanent damage.  He was the most graceful dancer Lucille had ever laid eyes on, just as she knew he would be all those years ago when they were children.  But his feet still bore marks that looked as though he’d been scalded with boiling water.  

 

Thomas’s body seemed to heal better than Lucille’s, or perhaps it was simply that he had not earn any new scars. He was, as he always had been, beautiful, pure, and perfect in the face of the scarred, sullied, and damaged Lucille.  Now that they were adults that was all the more obvious.  He was everything Lucille was not.  The light to her darkness.  The sun to her moon. Everything she needed in the world.  Everything she wanted.  

 

The Sharpe siblings were not the only things that had changed since their childhood, since the time before they were torn apart.  The world around them was new and different, changing more rapidly than it ever had before.  For Lucille it was jarring, disturbing even, as the end of the century lurched towards them.  Thomas seemed so brave in the face of progress.  But one thing remained constant.  Lucille loved Thomas and Thomas loved her back.  As long as that was true the world beyond Allerdale Hall could end altogether and Lucille would not mind.

 

Lucille and Thomas had become even closer.  They were closer than siblings.  Closer than lovers.  Closer than any two beings had ever been or would ever be again.  They shared everything: food, music, stories, secrets, their bodies, their blood, their breath; every aspect of their lives.  They shared things no one else would ever think to share, because Lucille knew now that no one truly loved anyone outside of Thomas and herself.  

 

The world was cruel.  People were cruel. Thomas was the only exception, and Lucille would protect him to her last breath.  Lucille had created a safe place for them both, the perfect world she’d dreamed of as a child.  

 

She now loved Allerdale Hall as much as she had once hated it.  It was their little world, their refuge.  It was a shelter from the rest of the world.  It was a hideaway miles from the judgment and whispers that met Lucille in society.  It was a sanctuary in which Lucille was safe strangers and the silent terror that possessed her whenever she was near them; a place where Lucille didn’t need to be afraid of what they might do to her, to Thomas, to  _them_.  It was a world where she and Thomas could be who they were, who they really were; where they could love each other however they wanted rather than being forced to play only one set of roles: brother and sister not husband and wife nor guardian and charge.  

 

It was the stronghold from which Lucille could shut out the future; a place where she could recreate a past that never was.  

 

She tried not to think of the future. Time was her worst enemy. Time consumed food and money and took her Thomas away from her. Time stretched on and on into that terrible unknown, away from this. But she wouldn’t think of it.  She avoided it as long and as hard as she could. No tomorrow. No next week. No new century looming like Goya’s colossus on the horizon. Only  _this_. Only  _here_.  Only  _now_.  

 

And for the most part, it had worked.  They had been together since 1886, just she and Thomas, with little interruption, little to disturb them.  The greatest of those disturbances now lay moldering in the clay vats below the house. Margaret McDermott was dead and gone, unmourned and unwelcome. Two years ago she’d lain where Lucille did now in the master bedroom she had no claim to.  In the end Margaret had been writhing in the sheets, seizing from the poison coursing through her system.  

 

When Lucille couldn’t take it anymore she ended the old woman’s life with a length of pipe Thomas had planned on using to fix the WC.  There had been blood everywhere, blood and bone and bits of brain.  Lucille could still picture it clearly.  As much as she hated the woman, murdering Margaret had shaken Lucille more than she was willing to admit.  It had been even worse for Thomas.  It was horrible.  Lucille hadn’t wanted to kill her, they chose a woman so old – a widow who had outlived her husband and a son older than Thomas had been when she married him – in the hopes that she would die on her own.   _But she would not die_.  She wouldn’t even sicken.  That was why Lucille went for the arsenic.  But the whore continued to hold on Lucille had been forced to dispatch with her even more directly.

 

It was Margaret’s fault.  Margaret did it.  Margaret did this to them.  Margaret had made Thomas reclusive and despondent, Lucille wild and cruel.  She had tried to tear them apart, to untangle Thomas from Lucille, but that would be like ripping a man’s heart out and expecting him still to live.  The old bitch cost them so much and would have taken even more, had Lucille not stopped her.  

 

Margaret  _never_  loved Thomas. She only saw him as an object. She saw his charms, his good looks, his title; but she didn’t care about the man below the surface. She did not know him or what he’d been through. It was as Lucille and Thomas had always said, no one outside of the two of them would ever understand,  _could_ ever understand.

 

It had taken a long time, but fortunately Thomas had recovered from the melancholy that had overtaken him after Margaret had been removed like the cancerous growth she was. The bleakness, the fear, the anguish that woman put him through -- put them both through – was gone, or had, at least, dissipated, like blood in water, no longer visible, so diluted you could drink the water and never taste its iron tang.

 

They could forget her.  They could recover, and both had recovered. The agonizing distance between Thomas and Lucille was gone again, erased.  The incompleteness, the insecurity, the fear that Lucille had suffered was gone. For some time Lucille still felt the emotional scars Margaret left and she knew Thomas did too, even if he wouldn’t say it aloud. But this happened less and less often as time went on and, with time, even this ghastly residue faded away and things were nearly the same as they had been before Margaret McDermott. Lucille could force the memory from Thomas’s mind, and he did the same for her.

 

To an extent, Margaret’s money made up for her crimes.  It went to paying back their father’s substantial gambling debts, the moneylenders their mother had plied without ever intending to return what she owed, and digging the house out of the clay that was ever seeping in like ceaseless floodwaters.  What was left went to Thomas’s hopes for the mine and the necessities that had become luxuries to the Sharpes, the things that might keep them alive just a little longer.  Just a few months more.  

 

That was how they lived: season-to-season.  They were like the peasants who once worked the land around them, clinging desperately to the little they had, trying to make it last, dependent on their health and their own stubborn refusal to die.  They battled for survival. Just a few months more.  Just a little more time.  Just one more month, one more week, one more day, something,  _anything_.  Every moment they earned through blood and toil, tears and sweat.

 

They deserved to be happy. Just once in their lives.  _Just once_. That was all Lucille wanted.  

 

She longed to see Thomas smile the way he had on the days their parents died.  She wished she could rid herself of the crushing anxiety, the self-loathing, the dread that always weighed heavily on her heart.  She wished they could have what they needed for once, without having to work themselves to the bone for it.  She wished she could escape the past as well as the future.

 

She wished they could both be  _free_ , truly free; free from fear, free from sorrow, free from all their suffering.  Sometimes it felt as if pain was all she knew.  All she was without Thomas.  As if all her life was an open wound and he was her only salve.  Why had they been punished so?  What had poor Thomas ever done wrong?  

 

Winter was heavy in the air and had been for days.  The sky above them was white and swollen as a spider’s egg sac, about to burst into thousands of spiderlings.  Lucille had spent the past week preparing for the dreadful season.

 

She awoke on the freezing morning of 25 November 1890 to find Thomas’s place beside her empty. Because there was no false wife sharing their home, Lucille slept in her rightful place in the master bedroom, that of the Lady of Allerdale Hall.  It was unusual for him to wake before Lucille or to fall asleep after her.  She was used to waking to find him sleeping soundly beside her.  Neither Sharpe slept often, but Thomas had more of a regular sleep schedule than Lucille had had since childhood.  The insomnia was one of the many dysfunctions that followed her out of the asylum.  

 

She sat up, fear having driven sleep from her head, looking around the room. Her anxiety was quickly relieved, however.  Thomas stood at the window in his dressing gown, his back to her.

 

She let out a sigh of relief.   “Thomas, darling? You’ve gotten up early. It’s scarcely even light out--”

 

Thomas turned to look at her; his expression was both tired and solemn. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said gently. He shone in the dim gray light leaking in through the window, filtering through the years that stuck to Allerdale Hall like enemy fire.

 

“Whatever is the matter?” asked Lucille. She slipped out of bed, wrapping a blanket around her to keep the biting cold from her bare skin. Thomas had already stoked the fire, but nothing ever properly warmed Allerdale Hall, not even the few rooms they occupied.

 

Thomas sighed. He put his arm around her, and she allowed him to pull her close. He kissed her cheek gently.  “It’s snowing,” he said finally, turning them both to look out the window.  He laid his head on her shoulder.  It was indeed snowing, the first snowfall of the year.  The flakes were big and fat and plentiful, like those in a snow globe.  It was already swiftly accumulating on the ground. 

 

Lucille wished she’d woken earlier to hold Thomas through this.  The first snow of the year always brought on a heavy mood of dread and depression in her brother.  Thomas had been weary of it since their father abandoned him on that fateful hunting trip all those years ago.  The day Lucille found him was the day of the first snow, and he nearly died in it.  Every year the same angst found him, the shadow of what must have gripped him in the forest that day.  Every year Lucille shared the burden of his memory and comforted him as only she could.  She would keep doing it until the end of time.

 

The memory of what happened that day, and, by extension, all their father’s crimes, would follow him forever, haunt him like their mother’s ghost.  Lucille looked over into Thomas’s face; his eyes bore a pained expression, the fear of a child.  “You are safe,” Lucille lied, but it was a kind lie, a gentle lie.  She touched his cheek, one hand releasing the blanket.

 

They both knew they would never be safe. The house was still on the verge of collapse and what the elements didn’t do, their mother’s ghost contributed.  Thomas’s fear became another enemy, controlling and commanding him.  For all his strengths and skills he needed Lucille to be strong, just as she needed him to get by among other people, if either of them would survive.

 

They complemented each other practically and spiritually.  Lucille was strong, Thomas was soft.  Lucille was jaded, Thomas was innocent.  Lucille was cynical, Thomas was optimistic. Thomas was afraid of being alone. Lucille was afraid of being with anyone else.  When Thomas was frightened, Lucille was brave; and when Lucille was frightened, Thomas became brave.  Two halves of the same person. One unit. Broken and ruined when separated, whole and perfect when together.

 

“It had to come eventually,” Lucille added gently.  She wished it wouldn’t, but she knew that wishing had never done any good, had never changed anything.

 

She turned so she was facing her brother. She leaned against him and he held her tightly, the way she held Thomas when he was small.  He was taller than she was now, though she had filled out since she had been freed from the asylum as an emaciated shadow, and stood less than a head shorter than he did.  The hand that had been on his face drifted downward, found the opening of his robe, and pushed the fabric apart. She reached in and touched his bare skin. She pressed her palm on the left side of his chest until she found his heartbeat, quick and frightened like a rabbit’s.  “Winter always comes; it will always come,” she told him, looking into his eyes.

 

“But why?” Thomas asked almost sulkily, burying his face in her shoulder.  Of course he knew why.  He understood the science of it; he understood how the seasons worked, but Lucille knew what he meant.  It wasn’t about the snow.  It went so much further.  Why couldn’t the snow come without bringing these feelings?  Why did winter mean they had to nearly starve?  Why did it have to be the way it was?  Why did they have to suffer?  Why was the world so cruel?

 

“All good things, kind things, all things that bring relief must end,” Lucille answered, just as bitterly.  

 

“Except for you and I,” Thomas reminded her, hugging her closer, lifting his head slightly.  She wrapped her arms around him as well, her head rested where his neck met his shoulders.

 

“I am not good,” Lucille reminded him.  

 

“I will always beg to differ,” Thomas whispered into her ear, close enough that she could feel his words as well as hear them.  She smiled against his neck. 

 

Oh, Thomas, her dear sweet Thomas; he’d never lost faith in her, never lost the innocence that made him treat her like a queen – or an angel.  It was comforting, and sometimes it almost made her feel like he was right, that somehow she wasn’t broken, ugly, venomous and hateful as a snake.  Perhaps once he had been right, although Lucille could not remember a time when she was worthy of his praise.  But now she was like the ruins of the Ancients: faded, violated, desecrated, left ravaged and forgotten to rot away, a shell of what she’d once been.

 

She let out a rueful noise against his skin.  “Thank you. Your delusion is, as ever, very sweet.”

 

“I wish I could convince you,” Thomas said, rocking her slightly in his arms.  “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.  You are my guardian angel, my queen, my goddess.” The words filled her like hot soup on a cold day; welcome, comforting, life-giving.  

 

“You are my reason for being, my prince, my most zealous worshipper,” she answered in kind, kissing his collarbone.  He slid his arms below her blanket.  She jumped slightly at how cold his hands were and he let out a sound almost like a chuckle. “I’m sorry, it’s been very cold this morning.”

 

“Then let me warm you,” Lucille said pulling back to look into his face.  She closed the gap between them, kissing him.  And he reciprocated, willingly, lovingly, enthusiastically. Gone was the clumsiness and reluctance he’d had when they were young, locked away in the attic.  Every kiss, every touch, every night they spent together put even the greatest love stories to shame. 

 

She walked him backward toward their bed until the back of his knees thumped against it and they fell together onto the mattress.  They separated only as much as was necessary to get him out of his robe and them both below the blankets.  There was nothing ravenous or lustful in their actions this morning; they were both seeking comfort and simple kindness rather than anything more carnal.  Their kisses were nearly as tame as those shared between two children, were it not for the sublime passion that spoke of their suffering and desperation.  

 

They clung to each other as if they were afraid of ever letting go. They held each other as if each needed the other to survive. They lay wrapped in one another’s arms, their legs intertwined, bodies pressed close. Thomas put his head on her chest and she ran her fingers through his hair, relishing the feeling of his soft curls under her rough fingers.  

 

Lucille could forget everything else – all the pain, all the fear, all the horror – when she and Thomas were wrapped up in each other like this.  Anything that reminded Lucille of their unique love, their unbreakable bond, their shared life was welcome.

 

“Before the storm picks up any more should we…?” Thomas began, his tone anxious.  

 

Lucille gently quieted him, “Shh.”  She kissed his forehead tenderly, almost like a mother would to soothe her worried child.  “We’re prepared for whatever storm may come.”  In this position she could see out the window, but he could not.  The only thing he could see was her scarred skin.  “The animals are safe in the barn, Finley is there to attend to them, and we can go out once the storm stops.  I slaughtered that fat sow yesterday and she will keep us fed for weeks.  We have dried vegetables and meat to provide for  _months_ should it come to that.  The pipes will not freeze, you saw to that yourself, so we needn’t want for water.  Even if something were to happen the well is not far and covered.  The windows are all closed and sealed as best as is possible.  I’ve moved everything that could be ruined from the foyer.  I’ve chopped enough wood to keep the fires going all winter.  Nothing has been left unaccounted for.  We will survive.”  

 

“You’ve thought of everything,” Thomas said with a soft laugh before gently kissing her breast. His lips found the scar she’d gotten when she was scalded during a session of hydrotherapy in the asylum.  She always felt as if his lips, his love, his attention, could fix any of the wounds the world had inflicted on her.  He knew she did and she knew that was why he paid attention to them.  “You always do.”

 

“And I always will. We stay together.”

 

“Never apart,” said Thomas looking up into her face with those big gentle blue eyes.  She felt herself smile.  She bent slightly and kissed his forehead again.

 

“Never apart,” she echoed.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end! I've got a couple more Crimson Peak fics in the works, I'm not sure when I will be finished with them, but they'll be coming up. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> I hope people like it! This is clearly a much younger and more innocent Lucille than the one we know and love, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what she would be like as a kid. I’m actually pretty happy with this fic for the most part. Gotta love the Sharpe Sibs, right?
> 
> I've sort of fallen out of WTNV. I've got a new Tumblr at http://queenofthecommunistcannibals.tumblr.com/


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